The Wonderful World of Color
short fiction by
Michael Zagst
Copyright 2011 by Michael Zagst
Smashwords Edition
THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF COLOR
My parents would tuck me into bed on Sunday nights right after we had watched Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color together. I loved that show. I've heard certain cynics contend that it only existed for the purpose of selling color television sets, that Disney and RCA were in cahoots, had formed some sort of unholy alliance. But you'd have a hard time convincing me of such a thing. Those Sunday evenings - flannel p.j.'s, hot chocolate, a warm bed, and yes, the wonderful world of color. I couldn't have asked for anything more. Actually, I did ask my parents for a baby brother, which I got later and wished I hadn't, but that's a detail that's irrelevant to what I'm telling you. The point is, that TV wormed its way into a pretty gosh darn happy childhood, all things considered. I associated Disney and the World of Color with the real world, real colors. Think about that for a moment. It's not such a leap in judgment when you're just a little kid.
Maybe that's why I became a little emotional when, decades later, I actually went to work for Disney. Old Walt is no longer around, and even now I wouldn't use such a familiar term out loud. There's a certain reverence around the corporation for the gentleman that lingers even to this day. So, yes, I got choked up when those wonderful people took me in. They don't hire just any old Tom, Dick or Harry off the street. Disney was the first place I applied for work when I moved to California. And you know what? It was the only lace I had applied. Only had they turned me down would I have focused my attention to the job market at large.
The place I came from was being overrun by people who had fled California. Don't ask me why, but I figured all those people headed east must be leaving a lot of open jobs.
I came from Texas, the place made famous by Disney's THE LEGEND OF DAVY CROCKETT. I have been to the Alamo in San Antonio. It's a little building, and not that impressive when you compare it with the movie about the Alamo that played on TV so long ago. Now, a lot of people don't even remember this nowadays, but do you know who played Davy's sidekick Georgie Russell? Buddy Ebsen, who later gained more prominent fame as the patriarch of The Beverly Hillbillies. In my opinion, Buddy wouldn't even have gotten through the audition door without the groundwork he laid at Disney. They say that Georgie Russell wasn't even a real person, that he was made up for Disney. The naysayers are always pulling stunts like that. I don't see what difference it makes. Goofy wasn't real. Neither was Bambi. And those two certainly warmed the hearts of a generation, didn't they? Do I have to bring up Old Yeller?
When the folks at Disney hired me, they wanted to make certain that I understood what my work would be. I'm a good listener, and I can tell you right now the words Mr. Peterson used that first morning at Disneyland. “If you make a mess, clean it up. If you didn't make the mess, clean it up. Is that getting through to you, Mickey?”
I know, I know. My name is Mickey, and look where I work. Funny how things work out sometimes.
The thing Mr. Peterson was saying was that it was the custodial department that kept the streets and sidewalks and grounds at Disneyland spic and span of litter, trash, garbage, you name it. And you could name some things you wouldn't think you'd find there. A rainbow trout in the middle of he parking lot once. How did it get there? Not important. We cleaned it up. And more often than not, maybe eight or ten times a week, we have to deal with little puddles of vomit. Children here, they get so excited, sometimes they're just beside themselves. They get out here, and the stimulation is all just too much for their little systems. It's not the most pleasant task to execute, but like they say, someone's got to do it, and that someone is the custodial crew.
Mr. Peterson doesn't work in The Magic Kingdom anymore. He was my boss, so it concerned me for awhile that I might be let go as well. Luckily for me, there was no wholesale housecleaning. You're judged by your own merits here. And Mr. Peterson may even return. From what I understand, he has taken an extended leave of absence. He had something funny happen to his way of thinking. For some reason, he started believing hat Disneyland was a jungle. He thought that the custodial crew was a platoon. He would gather us together for instructions, and say things like, “Mickey, I want you on point this morning. Report back to me if you see anything suspicious out there. You're on your own, so be careful. May God go with you.”
So I would listen and nod my head, picking up gum wrappers and paper cups until my lunch. Sometimes I would encounter Mr. Peterson in the break room. He would ask me if I had seen anything odd or out of the ordinary out there. No, Mr. Peterson, nothing more than usual, I would answer. (I mean, this was Disneyland. It's par for the course to see Jungle Book bears and dwarfs and other beloved characters on your daily rounds. The magic hasn't worn off over the years, but you get used to them being around a little.)
Then one day, Mr. Peterson just wasn't there anymore. If he went crazy, he went crazy. I know one thing. If Mr. Peterson returns to his old job, he'll be treated fairly. That's the kind of people run this place, and everyone is on equal footing - no favorites, no special circumstances. For example, celebrities come out here sometimes to take in the experience. They would like to close the place down, so they could enjoy the atmosphere without being mobbed by their fans. But Disney doesn't do that. You want to come on out, you do so just like everyone else. Deal with your adoring fans, but the park stays open.
I saw Michael Jackson here once, way back before he died, spinning around in one of those giant teacups. He was wearing a big bushy beard and a turban on his head, and hardly anyone recognized him. Michael had two little boys riding with him in the teacup, with an arm around each of them to protect them from falling out. When he stepped on solid ground again, I wanted to rush right up and shake his hand, but no one had to tell me that such a thing wouldn't be appropriate.
At least, I think it was Michael Jackson. It may have just been a skinny guy in a beard and turban. The point is, that fair treatment is practiced across the board at Disney. I hope Mr. Peterson does come back to his old job. His replacement hasn't been as nice a man to be around. I hesitate to be so judgmental, but I can't help feeling the way I do. I would take Mr. Peterson on his worst day over Mr. Diaz on his best. And that's no reflection on Mr. Diaz's ethnic heritage. This is America, and I am free to dislike someone regardless of their race, color, or creed.
Mr. Diaz took it upon himself to drive Dumbo in order to monitor the work of the custodial crew personally. Dumbo is actually a golf cart, modified to look like the flying elephant so dear to our hearts. You lift up his sides to get to the trash cans. Sorry to ruin the illusion. Anyway, now it feels like the boss is checking up on me all the time. And Mr. Peterson never used to do that. He would send us out and have someone else meet up with us on Dumbo. And it's not just the checking up. Mr. Diaz makes rude remarks that would make the original Mr. Disney turn over in his grave. It's gotten to the point where the sight of good old Dumbo makes me want to run and hide.
I opened up Dumbo's sides one day, emptying trash there while Mr. Diaz stayed seated right behind those big old elephant ears.
“Say, Mickey,” he said to me. “What do you say the two of us take a little stroll over to Frontierland and smoke us a couple of cigarettes.”
“I don't think so, Mr. Diaz,” I answered. “Smoking is against the rules. Besides, it's bad for your health.”
“Aw, come on, Mickey. You think all those people would smoke if it was bad for them?”
“Maybe they don't know any better. I do.”
“Yeah, Mickey. I guess you do.”
Then on the very same day in the break room, Mr. Diaz slid in beside me at the lunch table. We were the only ones in there.
“You like Tinkerbell, Mickey?”
“I guess so. Sure.”
“You know what I would do if Tinkerbell came flying into my bedroom window at night?”
I didn't want to know, but Mr. Diaz told me anyway.
“I'd make her shimmy up my shaft and do a little dance on the end of it before I let her out of the room. Yes, sir. A little fairy dance.”
I just threw my tuna fish sandwich back in my lunch kit and glared at Mr. Diaz in an icy stare. I don't like him, but I have to work with him, that stupid Mexican. A taco-eating pepper belly, that's what he is
Boy, I wish Mr. Peterson would get well.
I knew that I had to make the best of my circumstances, which, when I gave it some thought, could have been a lot worse. I was working for Disney, wasn't I? And if I wanted to keep working there, I would just have to make do. At least I didn't have Old Man Diaz on my back all day long. During my entire work shift, I wasn't in his company for even an hour.
Once the Disney people are certain that you know your job, they leave you alone and let you do it.
At the same time, I was thinking how nice it would be if I didn't have to see Mr. Diaz at all. I could do this by avoiding him. I started eating my lunches over near the It's A Small World Pavilion. This wasn't strictly against the rules, but some of the departmental managers don't like it when employees can be seen standing around eating sandwiches. I found myself taking lunch on the run, looking over my shoulder not just for Mr. Diaz, but for any departmental manager in the whole Disney outfit. And that's no way to enjoy tuna fish, I can tell you.
Another solution would be to get transferred. I checked out Maintenance and Food Service, did a little asking around on my litter runs. Nothing came of it, though. I even hinted to Mr. Diaz himself that I wouldn't mind expanding my work duties at Disneyland.
“What the matter, Mickey?” he asked me. “Don't you like it in Custodial anymore?”
What could I tell him? That I hated his guts and couldn't stand the sight of him?
“I like it here, Mr. Diaz. I just thought maybe, if another department comes up shorthanded, I'd be willing to lend a hand.”
“Hey, guys,” Mr. Diaz said loudly to the rest of the crew. “Get this. Mickey wants to be an interdepartmental floater.”
A couple of the fellas laughed, so I let the matter drop right then and there.
Then Fate stepped in and took matters into its own hands. I'll bet you didn't know that Fate had hands. I'm here to tell you it does. Great big ones.
The very next morning, a fog moved in from the Pacific Ocean. Everything was hazy. As much as I love the sight of the big old Fantasyland castle, in the fog it looked a little scary. I was out on my rounds, and the shapes of things all looked different, half hidden like they were. I saw something under some shrubbery that looked like a dead body. Now, the only dead man I have ever seen in my life was my great uncle Rudy, and he was laid out in a coffin. This thing looked deader than Uncle Rudy ever did. I was afraid to approach it. Yet I knew I had to. It's all right to be scared if you just don't lose your head. So I walked over to it. Sure enough. It was fully dressed, laying on its stomach. I took a big gulp, found my courage, and I reached over and touched it. It wasn't a dead man after all.
The body was Abraham Lincoln.
I called Mr. Diaz on his pager. He told me to hold my horses, and took his sweet time coming over, since I had called him in the middle of a coffee break. Certain people can be so irresponsible.
We opened up Dumbo's side and lifted Abraham Lincoln into the space there. I climbed aboard Dumbo with Mr. Diaz, and he drove us over to Imagineering. Lincoln had come from the Hall of Presidents. I knew that already. So did Mr. Diaz. The President was what you call an animatronic figure. That's like a robot. Mainly, it just sits in a chair in the Hall of Presidents, and words on a tape recording play while he moves his head and arms around. Mr. Diaz pulled into Imagineering's receiving area. We climbed off Dumbo and told them what we had.
“Yeah, Mickey here found old Honest Abe taking a little stroll. He had to run him down and tackle him.”
“It was laying in some bushes,” I corrected my boss.
“What do you expect me to do with it?” the receiving clerk said.
“Put in some phone calls,” Mr. Diaz suggested, and for once, I agreed with him.
We waited until the guy we had met there got some answers. He hung up the phone and let us in on the situation.
“Some of the boys got a little slaphappy last night,” he said. “Seems they had some wheelchair races after hours. Mr. Lincoln there took a spill. I guess they forgot to pick him up. Let's check him out. He's been out in that weather all night. Last time they did this, they programmed Mr. Lincoln to look cross-eyed and cuss a blue streak. Imagineers. I swear.”
The next few minutes, Mr. Diaz and I hung around and watched the receiving clerk give President Lincoln a thorough going-over. As much as I had wanted out of Custodial I knew there was no way I could make it over at Imagineering. If the receiving clerk knew how to troubleshoot their animatronics, you must need really advanced knowledge and training just to walk through the door of the place. The clerk finally took a step back from President Lincoln. Without talking to us, he just shook his head and made another phone call. He didn't look very happy, shaking his head some more, gesturing. He turned his back on us to speak in secret, as if Mr. Diaz and I would know what he was talking about. Finally, he hung up.
“Well, thanks for bringing it by,” he said.
“So what's the problem?” Mr. Diaz asked. “Can't the Great Emancipator get it up?”
“It was last night's humidity, like I suspected,” the clerk explained. “The moisture has penetrated the mechanism, you see. These older models may look like they could last forever, but inside, they're quite fragile. Plus, the battery's run down. They're supposed to be plugged in overnight. Like that golf cart of yours over there.”
He meant Dumbo the golf cart.
“So there's going to be an empty chair between President Buchanan and President Andrew Johnson?” I said, showing off a little, that I knew the presidents in order,
“Mickey, we can handle this,” Mr. Diaz said. “If that's all right with you.”
Boy, my boss burns me up sometimes.
“The main problem,” the clerk went on. “Is that the same guys who liberated Mr. Lincoln last night are he very ones we need to clean him up. And they're all up in the Burbank studio today. They've got some gadget movie going on. If we could get Mr. Lincoln to Burbank, they could get him up and going pretty quick. I can't leave, though.”
Mr. Diaz jammed his hands in his pockets and rocked back on is heels. He does that a lot when he tries to look important, to be a big man. Then I had an idea.
“I could drive Mr. Lincoln to Burbank,” I said.
“Oh, I don't know, Mickey. Do you think you could find your way?”
Mr. Diaz stopped rocking on his heels. He stood there flatfooted and stared at me. Could I find Burbank? What kind of a stupid question was that? I found California, didn't I? I drove twelve hundred miles straight through from Texas without stopping, except when I ran out o gas in Arizona, so excited by then that I had forgotten to check the fuel gauge. Could I find Burbank.
“Yes.”
“Okay, Mickey,” Mr. Diaz said. “You get up there as quick as you can. Then come on back. Don't you run off to Las Vegas with old Abe.”
We loaded Abraham Lincoln into a pickup truck. The clerk explained that the foggy air was still too full of moisture to put him in the open bed. So Mr. Lincoln sat up front with me. This was perfect. It wasn't exactly a transfer out of Custodial, but it got me away from there on a temporary basis. And this would look good on my permanent work record, that I was adaptable to emergency situations. Best of all, I could walk down the Hall of Presidents tomorrow, or ten years from now, and look at Abraham Lincoln sitting there, knowing that I personally had something to do with maintaining the exhibit
I drove out of Disneyland, moving down the great boulevard that gives you such a neat view of it from a distance. I checked the gas gauge this time, too. It looked okay, but I pulled into the nearest service station anyway, and waited for the pump jockey to see what I wanted. He came on out, and I rolled down the window.
“How do I get to Burbank?”
The attendant leaned his arms onto the door of the Disney truck, and started talking a mile a minute, pointing this way and that in order to illustrate the directions he was giving me. He made it much more complicated than it had to be, and I listened closely, pulling out the important point when I could. The guy glanced over at Mr. Lincoln every now and then while he talked, and finally just stopped himself.
“Say, is that old boy all right?” he asked referring to my passenger. “He don't look right around the eyes.”
Rather than go into a long explanation of what I was doing, which was nobody's business but mine and Disney's, I told a little lie.
“His doctor is in Burbank,” I said. “I'm taking him to his doctor in Burbank. His foot doctor.”
The pump jockey nodded his head a couple of times, then resumed his directions in extraordinary detail. I couldn't spend all day at the gas station, and saw that I had to interrupt him if I was ever to get on my way.
“What you're telling me is that I make a left at the light, get on Interstate 5, and stay on it.”
“Not Five South. That would take you to Tijuana. You want Five North, You'll see the Burbank exit. It's a pretty good ways up there, though. Just be patient.”
You might not know anything about California, so I'll tell you this one thing. Disneyland is in Anaheim, and Burbank is pretty far up there. On a map, it looks like there are fifty or a hundred towns between the two of them. That's where the surprise comes in. It's all one city. You can't tell one town from another when you're on the highway going through them. I know that a lot of people have left the state, but their houses and apartments and office buildings are still packed together like dominoes in their boxes. And the worst thing is, the freeways are ten and twelve lanes wide, always full of cars in both directions, bumper to bumper for forty miles. That's the biggest impression I have of this area around Los Angeles.
So I got on the freeway with a million other cars and trucks and headed toward Burbank. The fog was still hanging in the air, which made it feel a lot colder than it was. I was actually shivering inside that truck when it occurred to me that I had a heater right there. I turned it on, and hot air blew right into my face. It blew in Mr. Lincoln's face too.
I noticed the cars on the inside lane were going faster than any of the other ones. I don't know what it is about fog, but people seem to forget what they're doing when they drive. They become slowpokes for no reason at all. I squeezed over to the left. Which is easier said than done, but I got over there. Pretty soon I was passing everybody. There were places where the other lanes stopped completely, but Mr. Lincoln and I were flying at something like fifty miles an hour.
Then all of a sudden, bam! I struck a hard bump. The truck shook all over. I glanced over at Mr. Lincoln. I swear I thought I had seen him move, but it was just the pothole I had hit. Still, I got this creepy feeling. It was like, maybe he really was alive and I was taking him to his doctor like I had said. I kept one eye on the road, and one on Mr. Lincoln.
Out of nowhere, Mr. Lincoln's left arm extended straight out, then pulled in across his chest, like some kind of robot salute. I thought I would hit the guardrail when it happened. Then some whirring came out of him, and Mr. Lincoln started to speak.
“Four score and seven yearszzzzz,” he said.
Mr. Lincoln's head tilted from side to side. He even looked at me once, and that arm of his started going again.
“A house divided cannot stand.”
I had never seen anything like it, and I've been to Dallas and Fort Worth.
Mr. Lincoln was some sort of zombie there in the truck with me. It bothered me to have him acting up, but I had no place to stop and straighten him out. I reached over, grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him pretty hard.
“Shut up. I'm trying to drive.”
I knew he couldn't really hear me, but I spoke to him anyway, the way people shout at a ringing telephone to hang on, they'll be there in a second. Old Mr. Lincoln, he kept on going, looking at me with those crazy eyes, raising that arm around. I slapped him a good one across the side of his head, and he quit moving and talking then.
A car raced around me. It was a woman. She was pretty angry for some reason, yelling in my direction like I could hear what she was saying, holding a cellular phone to one ear.
These California drivers. They are something else.
A few minutes later I looked in the mirror, and right behind my bumper was a highway patrol with his lights flashing. This was just what I needed. Slowly, I managed to creep across four lanes of traffic and pull up on the side of the road. The police car stayed right with me. When I parked, so did he. The cop got out, and started walking my way.
Now, I've seen what California policemen do to people on the news, and that's the first thing I thought of. He was going to beat me to a pulp. Worse than that, he might get out that night stick and start cracking Mr. Lincoln a few times. I could just see myself trying to explain that to Old Man Diaz.
I cranked the window down for him and the officer came over and stood there. He looked at me a long time. He stared at Mr. Lincoln too. You know how police officers always ask drivers for their license and registration? Even if it hasn't happened to you, you've seen it in the movies. This policeman didn't say anything like that. He didn't open his mouth for maybe a whole minute. Finally he spoke to me.
“What in the hell do you think you're doing?” he said.
“Well, sir, I work for the Disney corporation, and I'm taking this here robot from Disneyland in Anaheim to be worked on at the Disney studios in Burbank.”
“I got a 911 call about you,” the highway patrolman said. “A woman aid you were beating up your passenger, an old man who couldn't defend himself.”
“No, sir. I was just trying to keep Mr. Lincoln from falling off the seat.”
“You wouldn't be using that dummy to be in the carpool lane when you have no business being there, would you?”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“That inside lane. Why do you think it was going so fast?”
“I wasn't aware there was such a thing.”
The officer just shook his head, returned to his car, and drove away without so much as a “Have a nice day.” It was a little brusque, but at least he didn't give me a ticket, which he could have done.
I found the studio in Burbank easy as pie. I didn't get to see any movie stars, or even the cameras or stage. One of the Disney imagineers met me in the parking lot, had one look at Mr. Lincoln, and asked me if I had warmed him up with a hair dryer. I explained that the truck's heater had been on most of the way. The technician replaced Mr. Lincoln's battery pack, and that was that. The sixteenth president was as good as new. The engineer looked over at my Disneyland I.D. badge.
“You did a good job, Mickey,” he told me. “That warm air did the trick.”
Those remarks made my day. Mr. Diaz could learn a lesson or two in manners from a guy like that.
Ever since I was a little boy in Texas, I had heard of the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, all those ice age animals that were found there, trapped in the goo. On the way back to my job, I decided to stop, as long as I was this close to the pits.
Thinking about how Mr. Lincoln began his ordeal in the first place gave me the idea that the tar pit museum might have a wheelchair I could use for him. And sure enough, they had a spare one for visitors who were unable to walk on their own. I thought that was great, the way cripples can be accommodated in public these days. Polite folks don't normally stare at someone in a wheelchair, but since Mr. Lincoln might be recognized and create a lot of questions in people's minds, I put a cowboy hat on him that was in the truck, and pushed him inside. We moved into a little theater that showed the history of the tar pit, then took a tour of the exhibits. They had real skeletons of camels and elephants, hundreds of wolves and condors and eagles, true life monsters from long ago.
I parked Mr. Lincoln at the foot of a mechanical display of a saber tooth tiger as it attacked a giant sloth in a pool of oozing tar. For all eternity, the cat sank its claws and teeth into its prey, while the sloth gazed over its wounded shoulder, as if to say, “Boy, this just isn't my day.”
I pushed Mr. Lincoln up close, robot to robot, letting them get a good look at each other. All I had to do was throw a switch, and Mr. Lincoln would join the act, swinging his arms and legs around, jabbering his head off about stuff of a historical nature. But I didn't. I just stood back and admired all the creatures, the man and the extinct animals who were no longer able to appreciate the wonderful world of color.
PRECIOUS METALS
Slim was in pain. The affected area was roughly the same as a batter's strike zone, from the knees to the shoulders, along the spine, down in his stomach and within the chest. Late in the days, the ache knew no confinement. Slim was weary, and he did not exaggerate by saying he hurt all over. He knew the cause. It was sleeping on pavement, hardly eating, and drinking. And constantly moving. Slim was on his feet for a good part of the day, stepping off the mites of concrete. Catching his reflected image in a pane of glass, he was reminded of Lazarus. He looked like someone raised from the dead, and worse, he felt like one as well.
At nightfall, Slim decided against sleeping at the mission. He wouldn't have minded some company, but not sixty beds on either side of him, bedded down among the hallucinators, among the ones grasping at the cross of Jesus, among his peers. Someone had told him that a guy Slim knew was sleeping beneath a bridge on the north edge of downtown. “Which bridge?” Slim had asked. “Which street?”
“Don't remember. One of 'em. It's Lefty. He's fixed him a place there. You know Lefty.”
Slim moved on down the pavement. He walked through the warehouse district, and cut back to the foot of Main Street. That was the highest bridge over Buffalo Bayou, and from there, Slim could see a few blocks upstream or down. He leaned out over the railing, looking back down at the water below his feet. It was the color of chocolate milk, its only movement some slow swirls here and there. He didn't see anything of Lefty. Before vacating the area, Slim squeezed past the bridge railing and pushed into the undergrowth. From the bank of the bayou, he looked overhead at the bridge's girders for any sign of a man tucked away in the steel. San Jacinto Street was three blocks downstream. Slim climbed up to the cross street once again, and walked in that direction.
At the foot of the second bridge, Slim could smell trash burning nearby. He slipped down beneath the structure. Across the bayou, on the north side of the bridge, he located the source of the smoke. He thought he could make out some movement in the fading light as well, and he walked the length of the bridge in that direction. As he left the pavement once again, Slim was certain to make some noise. Whether it was Lefty in there or not, he didn't want to sneak into the man's encampment unannounced. He kicked at some brush. He coughed, taking deliberate steps while keeping his eyes peeled.
He found the fire. A shelf from a refrigerator was set on bricks above the smoldering cardboard and paper. Back up under the bridge he saw a grocery cart with somebody's goods in it. He took a seat upwind from the smoke. He was sitting there when Lefty walked up from the water's edge. Lefty's pants were wet to the knees. In one hand he was carrying a pocketknife, the blade closed. From the other, Lefty dangled a fish that was three feet in length. Slim got to his feet.
“Say, what you got there?”
Lefty didn't break his stride. He passed Slim and draped the fish onto the metal grill, squinting into the smoke and heat, and wiping his hands on the seat of his pants. “I saw you poking around up there,” he said.' 'You hungry for fish? There's plenty here if you don't mind gar.”
“I might eat some,” Slim said. “My stomach's getting real bad, though. I have trouble keeping food down.”
Lefty nodded his head. He slipped a short two by four onto the burning cardboard and sat on the ground. Slim rested his feet as well. He crossed one leg over the other and lit a cigarette. “How'd you catch him?” he asked.
“ I was up here watching the water, and saw him flip-flopping around,” Lefty said. “I could that something was the matter with it, thrashing around on the surface that way. Anyway, I whacked him a time or two with a stick, and pulled him in. The fish had a plastic ring around his head, a six-pack holder, you know? The
plastic was wrapped up in its gills. I figure it was choking. I don't like to start fires down here. They draw attention.”
“I heard gars wasn't good to eat.”
“Well, you heard wrong,” Lefty told him. “They're real bony, and they have that great big head that takes up a good portion of the body. But there's a flank of solid white meat along the backbone that's as good as catfish. The meat on this one looked real good when I cleaned it. No tumors or nothing. Gars is about the only fish left in this dirty old stream. Now, pigeon, sometimes you find one so stringy that a cat wouldn't eat it. A pigeon can live to twelve or thirteen in the city. You get one that old, and your work is cut out for you.”
Slim couldn't recall the last time he had an appetite. He didn't think much about eating anymore, but he had to admit that Lefty's fish was beginning to sound like a luxury.
“How are you going to flip him when that side's done?”
I got a second grill over there. We can lay it over the fish, then turn the whole thing, grills and all. There's a bag of potato chips we can open when the fish is cooked.”
“You're a lucky man, Lefty.”
“How do you mean that?”
“Finding supper like you did.”
“Man, luck doesn't enter the picture. You just have to take what is presented to you, and the Good Lord will provide, if you don't set your sights too high What was it the Bible says about the lilies of the field and birds and stuff like that? The world is full of riches, and all you have to do is reach out and grab what's there. For free. Without stealing.”
“Yeah, the streets are paved with gold,” Slim said.
Lefty stood up and placed the second refrigerator shelf over the fish. He seized both shelves, insulating his hand with torn cardboard, turning the fish over. “Maybe not gold, but there are resources if you know how to look. Some metals aren't so precious, but that don't mean they're worthless.”
The two men ate the fish and potato chips in the dark. Lefty served the meal up on sections of newspaper. He sliced an onion for accompaniment. While it wasn't the feast that Lefty had led Slim to expect. Slim managed to keep the meal down. He ate his fill, which wasn't much, and pulled the half-pint bottle from his pocket. He took a pull from it and put it away again. Lefty did not drink liquor.
“That's the reason your stomach's giving you fits,” Lefty said.
“No kidding,” Lefty answered.
“You know, it all comes down to hunger, really,” Lefty said. “If you have enough to eat whether it's there to reach out and take like the fish, or if you have oil wells in your back yard as income. As long as food is on the table, yon ought to be happy with your lot in life. You fixed up for the morning? You got plans?”
“Yeah, I usually rest up in the library a few hours when it opens. Maybe do the labor pool the day after that. Pass out circulars for half a day.”
“That's a hard way to live, Slim.”
“Maybe I don't have your ambition.”
“It's like I said earlier. Like finding the fish. All kinds of opportunities are available to the man who knows how to spot them. Maybe you just don't have the eye for it. But a man carrying circulars door to door isn't lazy. I know that.”
“So how do you do it, Lefty?” Slim asked “What's the secret, if I wanted to get back or my feet again fast?”
“It's no secret,” Lefty said. “I'll show you in the morning, if you like. Right now, I'm going to turn in. I don't care for sitting on the bayou a night. Go ahead and stay here. I'll be heading out early.”
“Thanks, Lefty. You got a nice place here.”
Slim rolled up his newspaper plate and slipped it into the smoldering fire. When the paper flared up, he could just see Lefty hanging a hammock up in the girders at the foot of the bridge. In a way, he was kidding Lefty about the territory he had marked off as his own. There certainly weren't any doors or fences out there beneath the city sky. And anyone could come by and bust up the place and do all kinds of harm. Still, as Slim broke down a cardboard box out into a flat sheet, he did feel like a guest. The bridge was Lefty's place, and Slim curled up in a corner of it. Occasionally, a car crossed the roof in the night. And as he nodded off, the sound transformed itself into waves breaking on the seashore.
Lefty tapped on the soles of Slim's shoes to awaken him in the morning. “If you're coming come on.” he said. “I'm going.”
Slim was balled up on the cardboard, and he unfolded his arms and legs. He had been lying on the hip where he carried his bottle, and he felt as stiff and sore as if he'd been hit by a car. He removed the bottle from his pocket. While he unscrewed the cap, he watched Lefty struggling with the grocery cart, working it around the bridge abutment onto the street. He drained the last of the liquor and followed Lefty.
By the time Slim was on the sidewalk, Lefty was already a block away. Slim fought his clothing, hiking up his pants and tucking in his shirt at the same time. He ran his hand through his hair. He could still see Lefty ahead of him, widening the distance. Maybe he had overestimated the man. It could be that Lefty was as crazy as a bedbug. Barely daylight and there he was at the handlebar of a grocery cart in some kind of damn race. Slim halted for a moment. He was about to let Lefty go, to see whether he might disappear without even looking back. Then, he saw Lefty turn his cart into an alley off the sidewalk, vanishing from sight. Slim took his time reaching that point, and when he did, he found Lefty going through a couple of garbage cans.
“Man, I thought you had something special up your sleeve.” Slim said.
Lefty flipped a couple of beer cans into his metal cart. He moved to a trash dumpster at the rear of the building, sliding open the side door. He reached in with a stick and raked through the debris within the container. He pulled out more aluminum.
“Old Red Jackson got himself caught in the dumpster last winter,” Lefty said. “The trash drivers, they bounce it a time or two to wake up a man if he's sleeping away a cold night inside. Red didn't get out in time. He was half in and half out when the dumpster was raised into the air. Took off his right leg clean as a whistle. I saw Red about a month ago. The county got him a wooden leg, but someone stole it, so he's a cripple now. I know, you're supposed to call them disabled or handicapped. But in my day, a one-legged man was a cripple. About a month ago, I found some coils of air conditioning duct in here. Weight was about thirty pounds. I got over nine dollars for it. They're paying a little less right now, though.”
Slim stuck his head into the dumpster. The container was about half full of paper and boxes. Still, it had an awful smell to it. Lefty had managed to fish out six aluminum cans. Slim walked around to the rear of it and took a leak on the ground. Lefty waited on him this time before hitting the sidewalk.
“So this is what you do?” Slim asked as they walked. “You're a scavenger?”
“I just pick up what people throw away,” Lefty said. “It's worthless to them, but it's money in the street.”
“Well, the labor pool is bound to pay better.”
“That's right,” Lefty said. “It does. But you got the bosses there riding you every minute. And they cheat you when they can.”
“So how many pounds do you find a day?”
“I call it quits at eight to ten pounds, get my two and a half, three dollars at the recycling center, and head back in. I'm back at the bridge by two in the afternoon.”
“Why bother with just aluminum?”
“What do you mean?”
“To hear you talk, you could melt down the silver lining in every cloud.”
“I'm just pointing out an option you might not have considered,” Lefty said. “Whether you act on it or not, that's your choice.”
Slim walked along with a hand on Lefty's grocery cart. He had heard worse propositions. “How about if I work that side of the street?” he suggested. “Come quitting time, we split the money.”
“Any way you want to work it,” Lefty answered.
They moved parallel to each other on their way out of the downtown area. At times, Lefty took the lead. Then Slim might leapfrog ahead of him. Whenever Slim had as much as he wanted to carry in the paper sack he had retrieved, he would empty his pickings into Lefty's cart. They followed the street through an inner city neighborhood, and the aluminum was scarce. Lefty pointed out that the residents there hardly let anything slip by. But once the two men moved out of the more impoverished area, they could count on a couple of cans on each block. Slim was accustomed to walking a number of miles each day, but his legs ached nonetheless, as always. He found an upright beer can that wasn't empty, and looked at the contents through the opening as he sloshed it around. It looked fairly clean to him, and he drank down the last of the stale beer before saving the can.
At a Safeway parking lot, Lefty and Slim teamed up to examine a large dumpster. Lefty pulled out three cans, and studied a plastic garbage bag. He ripped it open.
“Cheese, “ Lefty said. “Look, it's still cold. They must have just brought it out.”
“Man, it's covered with mold,” Slim said.
Lefty removed one of the packs of cheese and carved into it with his pocketknife. He sliced off a wedge and popped it into his mouth. He cut off a second piece for him. Slim took it reluctantly, examining it before putting it in his mouth. He swallowed it down. He hiccupped once.
“You just cut off the mold, and it's fine,” Lefty said. “Say, you can cure those hiccups real easy. You want to know how? Press your thumb up against the soft part in the roof of your mouth.”
Unquestioning, Slim was nearly gagging on his thumb when a bread man came out of the rear of the store with a rack of loaves. He began to pull his order from the back of his parked truck, and noticed Lefty and Slim sitting on the shady side of the dumpster. He walked over and gave them a loaf off the truck. “Thanks, mister,” Lefty said.
“That guy know you?” Slim asked, rolling a piece of bread around some cheese.” It seemed his hiccups had vanished.
“Never seen him before,” Lefty said. “These fellows in the trucks are generally pretty nice, though. See, their goods are dated, and they have to throw it away after a certain time, I get just about all the bread and milk and chips I want. Sometimes you have to ask. The worst that's ever happened is they said no. They're all right, these food guys. I'm thinking about moving out here to the suburbs, to be closer to the stores.”
As they rested there, a limousine swung up to the curb at the side of the store, parking well away from the other vehicles. A big driver opened the door and stepped out. Lefty and Slim watched him as they held the cheese sandwiches in their hands. The chauffeur was a huge man. He was well dressed in a dark suit. They could see gold chains around the driver's neck, and an expensive watch shined from his wrist in the daylight. He stepped around the corner into the Safeway.
“That's a strapping big fellow,” Lefty said. “He could probably go out to California and work in the movies, a man his size. Most movie stars are pretty tiny, five foot three, five-four. There are exceptions, of course. John Wayne, he was about five-seven, I believe.”
“All right,” Slim said. “Enough of this aluminum shit. Here's what we do. He comes out, we knock him over the head, grab the gold around his neck, and run like hell in opposite directions. If we both get away, we meet up at the bridge tonight. He grabs one of us, that's too bad.”
“He would grab us both,” Lefty said. “He's a young man in peak condition. He'd squash us like bugs. And besides, you hit a man over the noggin, if you don't knock him out, he gets mad as a hornet.”
“So you're against it?”
“Count me out,” Lefty said. “I spent two months on a chain gang once, and the experience taught me the difference between right and wrong.”
“It's wrong for men to have to live like we do, like vultures,” Slim said. “And, it's a two-man job to hit this guy. He has the size, but we have the numbers.”
“It's a two stupid man job, Slim. You're overlooking the fact that you and I operate on a low energy level. That driver would explode like a prize fighter. It's just not feasible, and I'm no that desperate.”
Slim looked down at the pavement between his feet as he finished eating all he could. He didn't even look up at the chauffeur when he returned to the limo. They were on their feet once again in a short while, and in the early afternoon the two men split nearly four dollars a the recycling center. They parted on the sidewalk, and went their separate ways.
One evening about two weeks later Lefty had some visitors at the bridge. It was Doc and Smitty, a couple of old acquaintances. They asked Lefty whether he had heard what had happened to Slim. He told them he hadn't.
“He's in the hospital,” Smitty informed him. “He got beat up pretty good. Slim and some other fellow assaulted a man, and got the tables turned. They tried to rob him, from what I hear. The guy grabbed Slim and dislocated his shoulder in the struggle. Broke his collarbone too. What do you suppose got into Slim to pull such a stunt?”
Lefty shook his head. “Hard to say what he was thinking,” he said. “Sometimes a man living by his wits overlooks the danger if he's desperate enough. It's too bad, though. I like Slim.”
Doc and Smitty agreed. They were seated on a pair of milk crates Lefty had salvaged, and they rested. The three men looked down at the dark water flowing in the slow-moving bayou. The skyscrapers of the city made the horizon sharp and vertical. Lights within the buildings were beginning to illuminate the twilight, but the muddy, chocolate water reflected nothing. They had made it through another day.
CONTAGION
I accompanied my wife to her various rallies, not so much in support of the causes she championed, but as a demonstration of my belief in her. The smoking ban in public spaces? Hell, yes. Stub them out, and keep them out. The endangered prairie dog habitat in the city park? Keep the critters happy at any cost. As for the crumbling buildings in the historic district, honestly, I could have gone either way on the issue, but I was behind her completely in restoring and maintaining every structure in Shantytown. Blind faith, they call it. Love. Whatever. Still, my suggestion to her while I fixed our eggs that the prairie dog village be relocated to the flat gravel roof of the decrepit Sprayberry mansion, which could double as a designated smoking area for those so inclined, was met by an arctic stare she normally reserved for the brain-dead opposition.
She was seated at our kitchen table, scouring the newspaper. She lowered it briefly, gave me that look, said, “Not funny,” and raised the newsprint between our line of sight once again.
I knew she was masking an ear to ear grin, and barely suppressing a laugh. Her ribs were aching from the effort to hold it in. One additional remark on my part, and she would explode.
“You know what? Piss on the prairie dogs.”
Gwen began to tremble a little, the newspaper rustling a bit in her shaky hands. No explosion, but I had gotten to her.
She lowered the paper, looking at me with such affection and satisfaction that I didn't mind that half of it was for the eggs. A man would be out of his mind to turn down even a portion of that look. I leaned over and gave her a kiss just as she raised the fork to her lips.
Have I mentioned that I stole Gwen away from another man? She was behind the counter at a Starbucks, and had lamented to a co-worker that she was stumped on the matter of her boyfriend's Christmas gift.
She handed me my drink, and I spoke the words that would make her mine.
“A pocket knife, a sweater, and that beautiful, crooked smile of yours. If he's not delighted with all three, show him the exit.”
But I digress.
Looking back, it was at that particular breakfast that I first noticed the difference.
Gwen took an enormous bite of food, nearly choking on the mouthful, and when she was done, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The gesture was enough out of character to catch my eye. Then something in her expression changed when she caught me staring at her. Something like fear, if I would venture a guess.
“Do I have to take a bath today?” she asked.
She showed me her hands, flipped them over, and displayed her fingernails.
“See? I'm not dirty. I don't want to take a bath.”
“That's really up to you, darlin'. You change your mind, though, I'll be glad to wash your back.”
She stabbed at her eggs, pushed them into a pile on the far side of her plate.
“Gross,” she said, utter disgust slumping her in the dining chair.
In my gentlest and most concerned tone, and I was extremely concerned, I said, “Sweetheart, you're scaring me a little bit.”
She seemed genuinely surprised by my words, and in that moment, I could see my wife return. It was just breakfast, the two of us, and a beautiful morning.
Late afternoon, when we were home again, Gwen gathered a sheaf of printed material and her clipboard.
“I need a hundred and fifty signatures,” she told me. “Let's get going if we're going,” and we were out the door.
It was our routine on such occasions that I tagged along with my wife. Not just for rallying support behind her. I just wasn't crazy about the idea of what Gwen might encounter. I mean, contemporary culture, variations within that culture, personality clashes, you never knew what might really be going on behind closed doors. And not just the idea of an ax murderers and crack addicts. I'm thinking Republicans. Vegans. Trekkies. Tone-deaf musicians. It could be an ugly world, and I was her back-up if the situation turned hairy.
Hardly anyone was receptive to Gwen's request for “a moment of your time.” No one actually slammed the door on her, but they might as well have. She stormed off of one porch, her face crimson with outrage and insult, joining me at the curb, my post, where I kept a sharp eye.
“You know what your problem is, Russell?”
Loaded question. Marriage is teeming with them. Two defenses. Stand there and take it, or fire the first volley.
“No, Gwen, but I have the feeling you're about to tell me.”
“In addition to your caustic sarcasm,” she said, already on the move, pumping so fast I could barely keep pace, “It's that wounded look of yours. Like you're just tolerating this. You're like those old farts you see in the mall, just wandering lost in the aisles while their wives are in the stores shopping.”
“I'm unionizing the old farts,” I said. “Don't underestimate us.”
Gwen halted in her tracks, and held her clipboard and pamphlets high above her head.
“This is important!” she said.
I walked her to the threshold of the house next door, lingering near her. We could hear voices being raised inside, a man and a woman, an argument in progress. Gwen was about to knock, but hesitated, looking to me for advice. I shook my head, throwing a glance toward the street. Scratch this one off the list.
Gwen beat on the door like King Kong kicking down that jungle wall of his.
The voices inside fell silent. After a moment, the porch light came on. The door swung open wide, and a man stood there, out of breath, office tie loosened, sleeves rolled to the elbow. He glared at Gwen first, then turned his eyes to me, just staring at us, one to the other.
“Come in,” he said. “Maybe you can settle this.”
I tried grabbing Gwen's arm, but she was already inside. I was right behind her. A woman was on the floor, sitting cross-legged. It crossed my mind that the guy might have knocked her to the carpet. But he took a spot on the floor just opposite her, squatting on his knees. A Monopoly board separated the two of them. Gwen and I stayed on our feet. In the background, the TV was playing cartoons.
“She landed on Tennessee Avenue,” the man said, pointing in the woman's direction. “My property. I have three houses on it. Before I can collect, she throws the dice, and moves on.”
“I threw doubles,” the woman said. “I had another throw coming.”
“You had to pay me first!” the man shouted. “That's the rule!”
“Then you should have stopped me! Cheater!”
“You're the cheater!” he blasted back.
They looked up expectantly at us, Gwen and me, sudden referees thrust into their lives like magic. We glanced at each other once, confirming that we could do this, and walk away without it leading to kitchen knives being thrown across the room.
“You have to promise to behave yourselves,” Gwen told them.
Nice. Provoke them. Get them going all over again.
“We'll be good,” the man promised, and all of them looked to me. I accepted the task.
“Here's my ruling. When you throw doubles, you do get an extra turn.”
“I told you,” the woman said.
“But you also have to pause long enough for your opponent to assess the board, and tally the cost of landing on his property.”
The woman rolled her eyes, took a handful of Monopoly money, and threw it across the board, demolishing the houses erected on Tennessee Avenue. The man reset them in place with a smug grin.
“If you're going to be a big baby,” she said, “Just take it.”
We didn't make a big incident out of it. Hardly discussed it. Takes all kinds. What a world. You never know. That kind of thing.
I was sent out of town to whip an unruly branch office into shape, gone for the entire week that followed, encountering a preposterous set of business practices. The filing system, the inventory, the record-keeping…don't get me started.
I still feel partly to blame for not being with Gwen. But what could I really have done, other than joining her, hand in hand, becoming as stricken as she?
My focus on the late afternoon drive home was exactly that - home. I watched out for traffic, of course. But the one detail I overlooked as I drew ever closer to my own house was the conspicuous abundance of people outdoors - adults clustered together, organized in various activities, block after block of this behavior. And they seemed to be having a great time, falling down with laughter, chasing each other around. Here and there, a child was included in the mix as well. I spotted a fat man working out on a swing set. It struck me then what I was seeing. My neighbors had all come outdoors to play.
Just a few doors from my place, I pulled up beside Joe Delby's car parked on the curb. Joe was crouched behind the vehicle, raising his head now and then for a glimpse down the block before ducking down out of sight again. Except for the grin on his face, I would have thought a sniper was in the trees up ahead. He turned and faced me, shushing me with a finger to his lips before I could speak.
I felt a surge of panic. Gwen was up there. Would I even find her, or had my wife run giggling into the fading light of day?
I swung into our driveway, relieved to find Gwen reclining on our porch furniture, her arm draped across her face. I slammed the car door, and walked up the steps to her side. She appeared to be sleeping. But her lips were moving. She was silently counting. She bolted upright suddenly, and shouted at the top of her lungs.
“Ready or not, here I come!”
With that, Gwen tore down our front steps, and ran wildly across three yards before pausing, scouring the shrubbery. Who knew where this would lead?
As calmly as I could, I walked deliberately across the adjoining properties, and was able to take my wife by the hand.
“It's suppertime,” I told her. “You have to come in now.”
Then I announced to the chasers and hide and seekers and olly olly oxen freers at large that it was everyone's suppertime. To my astonishment, they accepted this, meandering off in twos and three as I put Gwen in the car and took her to the emergency room.
Her vital signs showed nothing out of the ordinary. Then a doctor listened while I described the circumstances that had brought us in. He nodded, shook his head once, but had no answers. He threw around terms like airborne viruses, environmental allergies, mass hysteria. Whatever the cause, it all seemed harmless enough.
The behavior vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. I brought it up once with Joe Delby. He seemed slightly embarrassed by the subject, and I let it drop.
Then, marking no occasion in particular, Gwen presented me with a gift-wrapped box.
I pulled the ribbon and paper off. Inside were a pocket knife and sweater, and she told me through her beautiful, crooked smile that, for pulling her through her tiptoe toward madness, I was her true sweetheart.
I was touched by the sentiment. Yet at the same time, a certain undefined giddiness seemed to sweep through the room, and I said the only words that came to mind.
“I know you are, but what am I?”
Like the doctor said, it was probably harmless.
CUSTER'S LAST BAND
Years before any of the Seventh Army's soldiers had heard of the Little Bighorn, immediately following the Civil War, to be precise, Custer and his men spent some time in the capitol of Texas. This was 1866, 1867. As far as their official duties were concerned, the army had little to do in Austin. It passed the time by waiting around for an assignment that would take them elsewhere, a place more worthy of the skills for which it was trained. As it was, all that was required of the cavalry was to keep an eye on the conditions of the city to make certain that the Confederacy, or anything like it, wasn't taking shape again right under its nose. This allowed Custer the run of the town, with only his imagination as his guide. Custer did the same as many people with an excess of leisure time did. He attended classes. The general enrolled in The Texas School For The Deaf. Under the tutelage of an instructor who had never heard a spoken word, he pursued the study of sign language. Later, much later, well before approximately four thousand antagonists at the Little Bighorn would render Custer's existence moot, he would apply his sign language ability in communicating with the tribes of the western plains. The natives appreciated and respected the fact that the visitor in their territory had taken the trouble of learning, if not their actual dialect, at least a rudimentary method of putting across his point. The Indians, like Europeans, hated it when guys showed up, shouting in English, expecting to be understood by sheer volume. Custer, instead of merely shooting the Indians, was able to lay down his terms beforehand.
“Surrender, and come with me to the outpost, and I mean right now,” the general would tell them. “Otherwise, I'll kill you where you stand.”
Sometimes, the Indians would accompany Custer, not to Austin, but back to the fort out west somewhere, to be shipped out from that place to their eventual fate in the foreign lands of reservations. And at other times, Custer would have a fight on his hands, the outcome of which was never predetermined.
But back to Austin, around 1866, 1867, when the general was learning sign language: it was Custer's army, and by definition, Custer's band. The musicians within the Seventh Cavalry were a solid, accomplished unit, as proficient in its particular skills as any of the muleskinners and scouts and sharpshooters were in theirs. As a perk of being in charge, Custer had the band perform whenever the mood struck him. Specific tunes were rendered for the general's different functions. Lullabyes sent him drifting off to sleep after he had tucked himself in for the night. Minuets accompanied his noon meal, waltzes the background for his reading pleasure. It was rumored that the general's bowels would seize up without the inducement of a sprightly march, and conversely, that such music unannounced would send Custer running for the latrine.
The commanding officer displayed his orchestra around town, and the citizens of Austin couldn't get enough of this working band. At least, none of the Texans suggested to the general that the musicians were anything other than first rate. In reality, not everyone seated in front of the bandstand was absolutely thrilled by the recitals. The Seventh Cavalry was an occupational army imposing martial law. Custer in Texas was like MacArthur in Japan. The people who lived there were perfectly willing to wait out the commander with as much patience as required until the day he would move on and leave them alone. Custer wasn't blind to this, but he did tend to interpret complacency in the populace with affection and the highest of esteem. And he loved the power, knowing that with the snap of his fingers, he could impose a curfew, have a man hanged, or send the strains of Kerry Owen gently through the city's open windows, across meadows, through the military tent city he had erected on the banks of Shoal Creek.
Custer loved his band to such an extent that it became his talisman, his four-leaf clover. He took the musicians into battle with him, setting them up out of harm's way in support of his deadly effort. Think of Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, careening in over the breakers by helicopter, Wagner blaring from loudspeakers at a deafening pitch. Custer was without helicopters, but the band served a similar purpose, providing inspiration for the unleashed lightning. And those soldiers who played instruments had it easy, in comparison to those who didn't. Sure, the band had to pack up a cello or French horn on horseback and wagon every day. Setting up for gigs has been a chore always. It comes with the territory.
The band became well known at society dances. It gave concerts in local institutions, at The Texas School For The Blind, for the poor souls confined to the State Asylum For The Insane. Fiddles and flutes and kettle drums were hauled across town at the slightest excuse. It was good PR.
Custer held the reins of his power loosely, proof to himself of his benevolence. He could have lay down the law. And if Edison had been a decade earlier in developing the phonograph, Custer could have lay down some tracks for a recording. It bothered the general that the sheer physical bulk of his orchestra was so unwieldy. It would have suited him just fine to do away with them, to transport only their musical product into the field. But that actual concept couldn't form in Custer's mind, for Edison's invention was absolutely without precedent. No one, not one person, considered that such a thing was possible. As it was, the band accompanied Custer out west, a fiddle tucked beneath the chin in place of a rifle butt. The musicians played in the clear open skies, the compounds and forts and campsites as full of spirit as any city park's bandstand, coyotes tuning up in the night for harmony.
The band did accompany Custer on his last campaign. But the musicians lagged behind, slowed down by the tools of its trade. The wilderness was tough going for a man on horseback, and considerably tougher on a small orchestra negotiating footpaths and unmapped trails. Some of the musicians began to despair their lot in life. They climbed mountains and crossed rivers, virtually undefended in their efforts to catch up with the main body of the army. The cavalry was on a forced march, and the orchestra would reunite with its comrades only long enough to collapse into their bedrolls before turning out before dawn once again. Their salvation would have been a helicopter. And Edison did piddle around with the concept of that aircraft in 1885. The inventor described the escapade as “playing with dynamite,” resulting in badly burning one of his assistants, and losing most of the hair from his own head to flames as well. Two decades before the Wright brothers, Edison set aside his own designs on conquering gravity.
The orchestra encountered a river in the summer of 1876. It became obvious that only a raft could traverse it. The musicians bemoaned their circumstances. Not only would their trained fingers be reduced to chopping down trees and lashing together logs, but they would miss out on supper for a couple of days. They would subsist on hardtack and prairie dog, knowing that Custer's mood upon their arrival would be foul from the absence of music in the camp.
And the orchestra survived because they were shooting rapids instead of Indians. As it turned out, Custer and the remainder of the Seventh weren't shooting many Indians either. A great many of the soldiers, surrounded, preposterously outnumbered, shot their own comrades in the head at point blank range, many of them turning their weapons on themselves as well. The soldiers knew, should they be taken captive, that the Indians would torture them in unspeakable ways. The Seventh preferred to die on its own terms, by its own hand. The Indians had never seen such a thing. They were so astonished at the sight of their trapped quarry committing mass suicide that they stopped the fight momentarily to watch. Their astonishment turned to rage. They had never conceived of such cowardice. They were so angry that they rounded up the wounded and the survivors like fish in a finely meshed net, chopped off their arms and legs, bashed in their skulls, and cut off their heads. Which had been the exact fate that the cavalry was trying to avoid by turning their guns on themselves.
Meanwhile, the orchestra was miffed. Dissension riddle its ranks. The very idea of moving through hostile territory, armed primarily with piccolos, flutes, fiddles, and mandolins was especially disheartening. By sheer chance, the musicians stumbled into the arms of Captain Benteen, under whose cautious leadership an entire contingent of the Seventh Cavalry had bypassed Custer's final battle. The musicians learned that their army buddies were out there, cut to pieces and rotting on the battlefield. More regiments were brought in. The orchestra accompanied their new cohorts to the Little Bighorn, stunned into silence by the sight. They played a respectful rendition of Taps before helping to remove the remains of the officers for burial, leaving the corpses of the enlisted men to rot for years to come.
Within weeks, Edison invented the phonograph. The device, which an assistant mistook for a sausage grinder at first glance, catapulted its maker into prominence. Coincidentally, Edison traveled west the following summer. The twenty-four hour days of phonograph work and light bulb work had taken its toll on the man, and he was indulging in the first vacation of his life. He took a train to Wyoming in order to study a total eclipse of the sun. Scientists from all over the world gathered for the same purpose. While they had a grand old time of it, some were clearly apprehensive about the possibility of an Indian attack. But the only native encounter had been the arrival of a family of Utes, whom a visiting chemist describes as “friendlier than a little of pups.”
Edison ingratiated himself with his counterparts in a demonstration of the phonograph, explaining that, just as a camera captures an image, he had captured sound. Even with backgrounds in hard science, many on hand considered the invention to be some sort of trick. They threw tongue-twisters, and obscure pronunciations into the megaphone intake, intrigued as the machine duplicated every syllable of MethodistEspicopalmeanderinghopscotch. The scientists knew that Edison was deaf, for all practical purposes, and only guessed that deafness was a requirement to have dredged up such a concept. Equally fascinating to them was their observing of the inventor's method of listening to his device as he would remove the megaphone speaker, and clamp his teeth onto the instrument, his jaws and sinuses making a circuitous route to his inner ear. It was said he could tune a piano in the same way. The rather absurd spectacle led to the now archaic expression, “Are you hanging on my every word, or are you glad to see me?”
When Edison was very old, a tooth infection became a major setback to his health. He was weak and poisoned as a result. His solution was to have his remaining teeth pulled, and revert to a diet of milk, on the assumption that, if was good enough for babies, he would benefit as well. But it wasn't good enough. He lost ground and died, unable to hear, unable to distinguish much sound at all with his sore gums. This was 1930, more than half a century after the battle that had rendered Custer moot. By 1930, Edison had made a great many recordings. A dream of his had been to capture the performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in a studio of seventy-five musicians. This was while the inventor still was in possession of his own teeth, when he was not nearly so deaf as the composer he so greatly admired.
The second violinist on the cylinder recording was Bill McGrew, an army veteran who had pursued his interest in music after playing in support of Custer's somewhat unpredictable moods. Recruited from a store in West Orange, New Jersey that sold sheet music and lessons and instruments, Bill put in his day at the session just a few streets from the shop where he was employed, in the complex of laboratories dreamed up by Edison. As he studied and rehearsed his part in the proceedings, it occurred to him how many odd turns his life had taken, how many paths he had crossed. As a young man, he would never have thought that playing in Custer's Seventh would lead to Beethoven's Ninth.
Bill, who had lied about his age in order to join the army at fifteen, lived until November of 1948. He was walking home from the polls, having cast his ballot for Harry Truman, when he just collapsed in mid-step. Reasonably healthy until that moment, he was ninety-nine years old.
THE ROUNDUP
“Look, I want you to stop feeling bad,” Jack told his older brother. “Lots of people get divorced. There is a brighter side. Shirley left you the car. You could have nothing. She left you the furniture.”
Frank had sunk into the couch, staring at a spot on the floor. When he raised his eyes and met Jack's gaze, Jack was worried that his brother would begin to cry, a prospect he was not quite prepared to deal with.
“She left me,” Frank said.
“Yes,” Jack said. “That's the situation. What you have to do now is to determine what's next. And you know what? I'm here to deal with it too. Not stepping in and taking over, but a back-up. Isn't that what brothers are for?”
“I don't know,” Frank answered, sinking deeper into the couch, tilting now, until he reclined on one side and closed his eyes. “Maybe.”
Periodically, since the split, Jack had heard of Frank taking on exuberant, exciting things like newly single men were supposed to do - spontaneously jumping into his convertible and whisking away beautiful redheads for afternoon thrill rides, photographing sunrises, blasting his stereo at Richter levels, whipping up gourmet meals. But Jack saw the flashes of activity for what they were - outbursts of a man in free fall, flailing about as he grasped for something solid. Most of any given day, Frank was despondent, as he was at this moment. Jack tried to see his brother's side of it. In fact, he did see it clearly. Depression was expected in response to certain life events, and this just happened to be one of those events. Even so, Jack wanted to help lift his brother out of it.
“This is the day to draw the line,” Jack said, standing up to leave. “Go ahead and take a nap. Sleep straight into the night if you want, but when you get up, you're up. Understand?”
“Things are still up in the air for me,” Frank said, his eyes still closed like a man under hypnosis.
“I know they are. Come on over for dinner some time this week. Call us.”
“How's Camille doing? Is she still getting her realtor's license?”
“Almost,” Jack said. “Give us a call.”
Frank slowly opened his eyes. He looked suddenly lost in thought, and he began to smile. “Who used to say that all the time?”
“Who used to say what?”
“Give us a call. Give us a call. Someone we knew. Was it someone we grew up with?”
“A friend of yours and Shirley's, perhaps.”
“Mark Nagle,” Frank recalled, pulling himself into a seated position once again. “It was Mark Nagle. He split his forehead open with a boomerang once.”
“Oh, yeah,” Jack said. “Right. Mark Nagle. Didn't he have a sister who ate tar right off of the street? Now, I understand that eating tar in such a way actually indicates a mineral deficiency, something that…”
“That was the Potts girl who chewed tar,” Frank cut him off. “She turned into a real beauty, too. Runner up in a pageant once, something like fourth in line to be Miss Oklahoma or something. She eventually married a linebacker for the Minnesota Vikings. Mark Nagle didn't have a sister. He was an only child.”
The conversation hadn't exactly built a fire under Frank, but it was the most animated Jack had seen his brother in weeks.”
“That's right,” Jack agreed. “Yeah, you're right.”
“What ever happens to those people who disappear from your life?”
The conversation had raised Frank from the couch, and led them to the threshold of the open front door.
“They're out there somewhere,” Jack gestured outside. “Unless they're dead.”
“'Unless they're dead.' Thank you for that perspective, Jack. That makes me feel a lot better.”
“Frank, I didn't…”
“You know what? I wouldn't mind seeing Mark Nagle again. I'd like to know what he's up to.”
Frank's attention returned to the immediate area, the dismal, darkened room, and he looked into Jack's face now. Jack could se the shadows returning, practically swallowing his brother up.
In the evening, Jack finished the dishes while Camille studied her real estate material. Stacking the glasses and plates in a rack to dry, he couldn't help wondering how Frank was passing the time. He asked himself what more he could be doing. Or was his brother on his own on this one? He looked toward the dining table, his wife buried in the books and papers spread out there, a pencil clenched in her teeth as she concentrated. Jack had a thought. He wasn't doing this just for his brother. If it could happen to Frank, he could be next in line. In a leap of logic he didn't examine or comprehend, cushioning the collapse of his brother's marriage seemed to fortify the foundation of his own.
“Can I get you something, Honey?”
“Not a thing,” she said, looking way, the brief eye contact going right to his heart.
He closed the swinging door to the dining area, and leaned on the kitchen counter, pulling the phone book out of its drawer. He thumbed it open, and found some Nagles. Three of them shared Mark's first initial. He chose the middle one, and punched in the number. A man's voice picked up.
“Hello,” Jack said. “Is this Mark Nagle?”
“Yes, it is.”
“The same Mark Nagle who grew up on Gerber Street?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“Jack Baldwin.”
“Who?”
“Frank Baldwin's little brother.”
A hesitation on Nagle's part gave way to the connection as it came into focus. Jack was delighted, embarrassed somewhat as he was by the little brother business.
“Jackie Baldwin,” Nagle said. “Christ, I haven't seen you since you were a little kid. You always seemed scared of me. Or was that my imagination?”
“You were a bit intimidating,” Jack admitted. “An older and bigger guy, and then you had stitches in your forehead, and, before I knew about your boomerang incident, Frank told me the doctors had transplanted you a new brain.”
Nagle's laughter trickled out of the receiver.
“Listen. The reason I called is that Frank is a little down I the dumps lately. I was over at his house today, and your name came up. He said he'd like to see you.”
“What's the nature of his doldrums?”
“Divorce.”
“ Well, hell,” Nagle said. “I had no idea that Frank was s till in town. Say, I ran into Simon Raines a few weeks ago. He lived in the house behind ours.”
“Simon Raines,” Jack repeated.
“Don't call him Simple Simon,” Nagle said. “He's always hated that.”
“I wasn't about to,” Jack said, a little offended. “Now, wasn't he the guy who conducted the funeral service for Frank's rabbit when it died of diarrhea? Must have been a dozen kids in the procession, all walking our bikes and dogs while Simon tapped out the cadence on a drum.”
“That sounds like Simon.”
“Frank was very moved by that, I recall. So Simon's in town as well?”
“He's a grocery store manager. I work for a food distributor. That's how I bumped into him. You ought to call him up. Simon and Frank used to go everywhere together for awhile.”
“He could probably furnish me with the names of some of the pallbearers, older guys I might not remember at all. Do you have his number?”
“Hey, put me on board,” Nagle said. “Just say when.”
“Let me get back to you on that. When I have a feel for numbers and names, it'll be easier to set up a time.”
“Right,” Nagle said. “Give us a call.”
Jack hung up and located Simon Raines in the book, and Raines put Jack onto three additional names. Jack, in turn, followed those leads, and the evening was gone. Whenever he reached someone from his brother's past, the effort snowballed into at least one additional contact. By the third call, Jack had begun a list, already confirming seven people. He was particularly excited about landing Albert Tenance, an asthmatic boy who had become an insurance executive. Albert and Frank had participated in a fight that became neighborhood legend, and neither boy had touched the other in the course of the skirmish. Challenged to a duel, Frank's choice of weapons had been Roman candles, a strategy initially seen as a stalling maneuver. Weeks passed. Kids had forgotten all about the grudge. Then the Fourth of July arrived. Albert Tenance, suddenly cowardly and gasping for air, had to be egged on for the showdown. Frank was at the park, waiting. After everyone's bedtime, half the kids sneaking out in pajamas, Frank and Albert had faced off on a baseball diamond, each armed with ten balls of red and green fire, rocketing from their firing hand, their free arm holding a metal garbage can lid for defense. Albert's tactic was to become a moving target while firing wildly over his shoulder as Frank stood his ground, untouched, leading his opponent liked a flushed quail, nailing him again and again, burning holes in Albert's clothes, branding his skin, and scorching a furrow through Albert's flat top.
Later in the week, Jack was going over his list at the dinner table. His wife hadn't commented on any of his effort, other than to remark on the amount of work Jack was investing in the ever-growing project.
“How many names are you up to?” she asked.
“Twenty-eight confirmed,” Jack said. “I caught a break that George Mills works for the school district. He's getting us a bus.”
“A bus?”
“I was going to arrange for everyone to meet Limestone Park, but too many variables came into play. People coming too early, or arriving late, getting lost. So now, George will pick me up. Starting at our place, we'll work our way north to the airport, then back down to Frank's.”
She stared at him, awaiting his elaboration.
“Three of the Santini Brothers are flying in.”
“Does Frank know what's you're up to?” Camille asked. “Does he know any of the details at all?”
“I just told him not to leave his place on Saturday afternoon, that I had a surprise for him. He assured me he wouldn't plan anything else.”
“Your brother may not be too crazy about the idea if he finds out. In spite of your intentions, the reason that most people lose touch with each other is that they no longer share whatever it was they had in common.”
“Not this bunch,” Jack said. “They've stepped up for Frank.”
“I'd like to see the look on his face at that,” Camille said. “But Saturday is my real estate exam. And you knew that.”
“Is it? Aw, honey. I wanted you there.”
“I'm sure you did.”
She was right, and he knew it. Jack was excluding his wife from the event. What if this was the first unraveling of the fabric of his own marriage? What if, by only trying to ease his brother's worries, his own circumstances were at risk? Flustered, Jack was suddenly close to panic. His impulse was to burst out the front door, and drive straight to the florist, a gesture he hoped would counterbalance the other. Camille understood him, though, and didn't press her point.
“Has Frank gotten rid of the rest of Shirley's clothes from that closet yet?” she asked.
Frank shrugged, shaking his head. How could he know such a thing?
When the list stretched to thirty-five, Jack stopped making calls. He had put together playmates from his brother's childhood, high school teammates, a college roommate, and a handful of Frank's current co-workers. Regardless of their age when Frank had known them, they were all adults now. Jack wondered whether people from long ago would be distinguishable from their more recent counterparts. They wouldn't be Boy Scouts or fraternity brothers anymore. Jack was frustrated about contacting women who had known Frank. He felt a sort of taboo. But what could possibly be said to a woman with children or even grandchildren, who, decades ago, had had a horny teenager crawling all over her? Jack still managed to unearth a couple he imagined to be safe. One was a cousin he suddenly remembered, related once again after all these years. The second, an eighty-year old who had given Frank a series of stern piano lessens, accepted the invitation only after Jack's assurance of meeting her dietary demands. It was the single moment where Jack toyed with the idea of scuttling the enterprise. But he snapped out of it.
“I'm rounding up a lifetime of relationships, and I'm worried about sandwiches?” he said.
On Saturday morning, Jack braced himself with an enormous breakfast. George Mills arrived around ten with the bus, and Jack flew out the front door, meeting the huge yellow thing at the curb.
Jack seated himself behind the driver, leaning over his shoulder to hand in the route sheet. George Mills looked it over once, nodding his approval.
“Hour and a half, two hours tops,” Mills said. “Then we hit Frank's place. You've plotted things out pretty well, Jack. Frank is lucky to have a brother like you.”
“You ought to see the Santini brothers,” Jack answered, extending three fingers bonded in a tight cluster. “They're like that.”
One by one, Jack greeted each new arrival. As they found a spot on the bus, the small talk from those already aboard seeped outward to include them as well. Jack noticed that everyone glossed over their own names, or ignored them entirely when they spoke to each other.
“I played golf regularly with Frank twelve, fifteen years ago. Then, I don't know. Haven't seen him for awhile.”
“Frank and I lived in a tree for three weeks in college. We had issues with the administration. You want to get to know somebody, spend three weeks in a tree with them.”
As the bus lumbered through its wide turns, and bounced in and out of potholes, Jack surveyed the group, all moving together as one unit. The passengers were a collective memory of his brother, and at the same time, a pretty good slice of himself. Their appearance surprised him. Jack assumed that each of them would be well enough off. None of them were bums dressed in rags, but he recognized that a few had seen better days. Yet even the guy chain smoking through stained yellow fingertips had come when summoned. Jack wondered what kind of first impression the busload might make on a pedestrian as it passed by. He had to admit that, taken as a whole, the industrial vehicle, the passengers, this slice of himself, could well be mistaken for an outing fro the State Hospital. And if that was the case, he was fine with it.
During a delay at the airport, a festive mood overcame them. Only two more stops, and they would roll on to Frank's, the anticipation of that moment enough to fuel and sustain the high spirits. A pair from the 60's, and still anchored there, fired up a couple of joints. Jack was surprised by one of two taking hits from the pot as it made its way forward. He waved it off, though, didn't even want to touch it. Later in the day, maybe.
Joe Laughlin, an older boy from childhood who had always towered a head taller than anyone else, walked up the aisle and stopped at Jack's seat. Laughlin's height had topped off at five foot three, his weight peaking at one-ten.
“Jack, first of all, thank you from the bottom of my heart for including me in this preposterous shenanigan,” Laughlin said.
“This is no shenanigan,” Jack assured him.
“Whatever. More importantly, and this has nagged at me for years in the form of an elusive recurring dream, what ever happened to that skinny old tar-eating tumbleweed of a gal that lived across the street from you?”
Jack, watching out the window of the bus, at last saw George Mills returning in the company of Angelo, Tony, and Pauly Santini.
“I understand from a reliable source that she became beautiful and married a professional athlete,” Jack said.
The bus engine roared to life, and the vehicle began to roll forward while the Santini brothers wrestled a single enormous suitcase down the aisle. No less than twelve people offered accommodations for the night before they had even found a seat.
“That's what I'm talking about!” Jack shouted.
“Jack!” someone called from the back. “Hey, Jack!”
Jack craned his neck to see who it was.
“Dri-VER!” Sean O'Dwyer shouted. “Remember? Dri-VER!”
The reference completely escaped Jack, who merely smiled, nodded, then shook his head without committing either way.
En route to the final stops, Jack leaned back in his seat and listened to snatches of conversations.
“I know what Frank's up against,” someone sympathized. “My ex-wife used to pull some stunts on me. Man, oh, man, the stunts she pulled.”
“I bought two franchises in a health spa about five years ago. One here, one in Dallas. Aerobic tap dancing. That's the exercise of the future. But it's a hard sell, I tell you. I swear, I'm tempted to fire a pistol at the feet of those fatsos to get them moving.”
And Jack overheard the punch line of a joke, which went, “He asked me, 'Isn't that Hortense?' So I told him, 'In this light, it's hard to tell, but she looks pretty calm to me.'”
The bus lurched to a halt, and George Mills wheeled around in his seat.
“That's the address you gave me,” Mills said. ”Two doors down?”
“Okay,” Jack said, riveted in place, rocking back and forth. “All right.”
“Jack?”
Jack drew in a couple of sharp, shallow breaths as he took to his feet. He stood in the aisle a moment, and looked at all the faces, so filled with anticipation that he wanted to cry. Mills threw open the bus door, and Jack took his cue to bound onto the sidewalk.
On the front porch, he tapped twice, and heard the door latch turning, absolutely flabbergasted when the door did swing open.
“Shirley,” he said. “What in the world are you doing here? Are you and Frank…?”
Frank walked out of the kitchen as Jack stepped inside.
“I came to get the last of my things,” Shirley explained.
“I finally called her last night and told her to come and get them, or I'd burn them in the front yard.”
Shirley gathered the coat hangers together in her arms, and walked out.
“He would have, too,” she said as she brushed past Jack.
From the porch, the two brothers watched her climb into a waiting car with a man inside. The engine started, and she drove away with him.
“Well, down the street and out of your life,” Jack said. “She can drive that other guy crazy now.”
Frank slammed the front door firmly, pulling on the knob to make certain it had caught, at the same time slinging a flight bag over his shoulder. He took off briskly across the yard. Jack could barely keep up with him. In an instant, he was the little brother tagging along once again.
“Hey, Frank. What are you doing? What about the surprise? I've done a lot of work on this thing?”
Frank threw open the garage door, and flung his bag onto the back seat of the convertible.
“And I appreciate it, whatever it is,” Frank said, slipping in behind the wheel. “But I just can't handle it right now. I'll be back on Monday, and you can surprise me then.”
Not waiting for a response, Frank fired up the engine, the roar of it drowning out Jack's protests. Jack grabbed at the windshield uselessly as it zoomed backwards down the driveway. When he hit the street, Frank was gone.
Jack closed the garage door. He walked slowly down the sidewalk, and the bus door swung open to greet him. He slumped into the seat behind George Mills.
“Was that Frank in that car?” someone called out.
“The inconsiderate son of a bitch left,” Jack said. “All this planning, and he leaves me in the lurch.”
“The man has a great deal on his mind,” one of the Santinis suggested.
George Mills started up the engine, loudly grinding the gears, as if the school bus itself had to compensate for the sudden adjustment in plans.
“We visited relatives in Louisiana once,” Jack said. “Mom and Dad told Frank to watch out for me when we took a swim in the motel pool one night. He was older, and more responsible. Frank used to play too rough with me. That night, he dunked me underwater again and again. In the deep end, too, where I wasn't even supposed to be. He nearly drowned me.”
“It was only on the street that we were a team,” the Santini told him. “Behind closed doors, we fought like a pack of wild mongeese.”
“Mongooses,” his brother corrected him.
Santini sneered, actually baring his teeth a little, staring his sibling down in a display of decades-old pecking order.
“As I was saying, broken bones, busted teeth - you name it. Then the old man would come home, take off his belt. Beat us until he couldn't raise his arms above his head. Then, that is to say…then…well, I sort of lost my train of thought. Jumped the tracks, I'm afraid.”
“Nobody's perfect?” Jack suggested.
All three Santinis nodded grimly.
The bus pulled in at a grocery store, and the group equipped itself for an afternoon of food and drink. They took over a section of the park. Jack had a good look at them then. Possibly, Frank was their least common denominator. The fact that they had gathered at all struck him as more impressive than the reason why.
They spread out the food, and as they visited, when Frank's name did come up, it was mentioned only in passing.
THE GREENING OF THURMOND LEANER
At the peak of a small hill the forest opened to reveal a small building with a dirt parking lot, a bar, maybe a place where lumberjacks hung out, throwing down boilermakers one by one, making life hell for any stranger who might walk inside.
He made for the front door, imagining having to win an ax-throwing contest before earning the right to use the telephone. He opened the door; it was so dark inside that he had to let his eyes adjust for a moment. It was like walking in on the middle of a movie. It was only a small bar, with two accompanying tables. There weren't, he noted with some relief, any huge types in the place. He noticed that the phone on the wall was already tied up so he pulled out the only available stool and ordered a beer, eavesdropping on the conversation around him while sneaking a glance at the phone now and then.
“You shoulda seen her,” the man at Leaner's side was telling his companion. “Great titties, and what a pair of legs. Long perfect legs. A hundred miles of her.”
The other one started up now. “That's nothing. South Philly. Last New Year's. Not New Year's Eve. New Year's Day. I was waiting for my bus and these two broads pulled up and offered me a ride. Two of them.”
Leaner pulled on his beer.
“Did you go with them?”
“Did I go with them? Is that what you're asking me? What the hell do you think? Ten minutes later we were at their place, and they had my pants down. Funny thing was, they turned out to be dykes.”
“Couple of lezzies, huh?”
“Oh, yeah. But they both sucked me off anyway before going after each other. I guess they sort of warmed up on me.”
Leaner pushed himself away from the bar and went to stand right behind the man using the phone to see if that would hurry him up. He really wanted to get back to Amelia's and not upset her by arriving late for the reunion. “Excuse me,” he finally said, “I'd like to use the phone when you get off. I'll use it, then get right on out of here.”
“In a minute, Bud. I'm almost through,” he said, then spoke into the receiver. “Some nut's waiting to use the phone. Why don't I just come on over tonight. Yeah. Yeah. Bye.” He hung up. “It's all yours, Bud.”
Leaner thought briefly how surprised the man would have been to catch a beer bottle across the bridge of his nose. He really disliked being called Bud, with a vengeance.
Over the phone it sounded as if there was already a conversation going in full swing.
“Get down from there!” Lauren was shouting. “Get down and come here! Oh, just a minute.”
He heard the receiver fall to the floor, bouncing with a tubular echo.
“Sorry,” Lauren finally said. “Can I help you?”
“Collect call from Thurmond Leaner.”
“I'll accept. Thurmond, so you're not lying in a ditch somewhere. Where have you been-? God damn it, stop it.”
“Who are you talking to? Has the dog gone crazy?”
“It's a long story,” Lauren said. “I was a little anxious yesterday when you didn't call, so I went out for a drive and ended up at the pet store where I'd bought the dog's flea collar. I'd seen a monkey there, and on impulse I bought him, and now he won't hold still and let me measure him for a little western outfit I want to make him. In fact, I was having a hell of a time getting him down off the refrigerator when you called. Do monkeys bite?”
“Of course they bite,” Leaner said. “They bite, they have fleas, they masturbate, piss and shit. They are not cute after looking at them with a sane eye for ten minutes. What possessed you to do such a thing?”
“Hey, pardon me,” Lauren said. “I thought I was capable of decisions. The store owner's a real nice man, and he convinced me that the dog was digging because he was lonely. He suggested that the monkey would be the perfect little companion for backyard expeditions. I'm making a cowboy outfit for him, and somewhere I'm going to find a miniature saddle for the dog. And if you don't like it, that's just too bad for you, because I'm not getting rid of Bingo.”
Leaner's ears felt hot, and if he looked into a mirror it wouldn't surprise him to see his hair standing on end.
“Lauren,” he said, “please take the monkey back.”
“You'd never say that if you saw him eat a banana. It's a scream, Thurmond. A scream. I already told you
I can't get rid of him. It's just something you'll have to live with, Thurmond, listen to me. I don't want to be with anyone but you. This is just an eccentricity, and it really isn't that out of character, is it? Were you that surprised when I told you?”
“No, but that doesn't mean I wanted to hear it. Lauren, I've got to get back to Amelia's. Her phone's been knocked out, by the way. I just wanted to tell you I've made it here in one piece. I want you to do something for me. I want you to ask yourself, 'Can I live with this monkey on my back?'”
“You mean one more monkey.”
If he had been transported to the reunion at the moment he'd hung up, he just might have knocked the teeth out of the first relative he encountered. “A real nice man convinced me to buy a monkey,” he said aloud in the car. “I'll bet he never took his eyes off her legs, either. I don't want anyone but you. When you're here, no doubt. But in the meantime, the monkey salesman'll do. Hi. Remember me? I sold you the monkey. I saw your address on the check, and was in the neighborhood. How is Bingo adjusting to his new home ?”
What's the matter with me? Don't I love Lauren? Don't I trust her? And so what if she has a discreet transgression that's only physical? What's the big deal? He turned in the driveway. Still, if she's fooling around, who's to say I'd be out of line to have a fling myself? If I felt like it...
He had to park well away from the house because the guests were already arriving, then managed to make it through the living room and up the stairs undetected. After changing clothes he found himself in the kitchen with Amelia as she put the finishing touches on a number of snack trays.
“Here, stir this,” she told him, plopping a bowl in his hands. “I've got to finish these trays.”
Leaner guessed that he was mixing a cake of some kind. It was an orange batter with some blue-colored berries thrown in. Just as he was about to sample it, Amelia snatched it away. “I said to stir it, not beat it to death.”
“I'll just go out on the porch,” he said.
Leaner could see Charles in the meadow walking a few people around, pointing here and there. He sat next to his niece. “Jean, which one of you is older, you or Charles?”
“He's older,” she said. “But I'm bigger. He's a shrimp.”
“That's not a very nice thing to say about your brother.”
“Well, he is. Where were you? We picked some berries while you were gone.”
“I had to go find a telephone and tell everyone at home that I'm all right. What kind of berries?”
“They're like blueberries, only not so big. We wanted you to pick some with us.”
“Maybe tomorrow we can. I want to hit a few balls around. We could go after the berries at the same time maybe. Does that sound okay?”
“You know what?” Jean said. “Well, there's an old power line or something over the hill. There's almost no trees, and it looks like a golf course, sort of, because it's real narrow. We can show it to you, and there's berry patches there too.”
“That sounds fine,” Leaner said.
Charles was leading his group back to the house.
They were all middle-aged-fifties, sixties and older. They didn't seem to resemble each other, or Leaner, any more than a random crowd of pedestrians in a shopping mall would.
“This is Mom's brother Thurmond Leaner,” Charles said. “You can introduce yourselves, I guess. I might get something wrong.”
A small man in his seventies or eighties wearing a red flannel shirt was the first to reach Leaner. “They call me the Kid,” he said, slapping Leaner's shoulder with the back of his hand. “Where you from?”
“Houston.”
“Sure did come a long way for this get-together, didn't you?”
“No, sir, I was-“
“Call me Kid. Everybody does.”
“All right,” Leaner said. “Kid. I'm up here visiting with Amelia and her kids for a week or so.”
“That so?” the Kid said. “I was in Texas during the war. El Paso. You get over to El Paso very often?”
“No, I've never been there,” Leaner said. “It's about nine hundred miles from home.”
“Nine hundred miles.” The Kid pondered. “Big state. Big, big state. Dorothy, come meet 'Melia's brother. He says that Houston is nine hundred miles from El Paso, and I have the suspicion he's telling us the truth. This is my wife Dorothy, Thurmond. We live on the other side of the river.”
“How do you do?” Leaner said, feeling very much the center of attention. “I might be wrong about that mileage. It could be only seven hundred.”
“How do you come to be a Leaner?” Dorothy asked him.
“I'm no historian,” Leaner said. “Apparently a branch of the family moved south. Are you a Leaner?”
“I used to be, till I married the Kid. I'm a Doolin now. Let's see. If you're Amelia's brother, that means that my father and your grandfather were probably first cousins. So somewhere, way back, we had a common ancestor.”
“I suppose so,” Leaner said.
No one else seemed to be doing any of the talking, and when Leaner stopped speaking there was dead silence. Finally a fat woman nudged someone else, gesturing at Leaner, saying, “He looks like Doris's Leland.”
Leaner excused himself from the company of the Kid and Mrs. Doolin and seated himself beside the woman. “Pardon me,” he said. “Did you say that I look like Cloris Leachman?”
The woman threw back her head and laughed a wheezy and tear-filled laugh, jiggling the pouch of fat above her elbows. “Oh, listen to him,” she cried. “That's rich. Cloris Leachman.”
Leaner chuckled too. Six or eight carloads of relatives were driving up now, and none of them were under sixty years of age. Leaner felt like the envoy of a small, youthful nation, an island with a language of its own, undecipherable to outsiders. Kid Doolin latched onto his arm. “Say, Tex,” he said, “what do you use on deer down your way? I favor the thirty-thirty. Breaks right through small tree limbs and puts an animal down in its tracks.”
Leaner pretended not to hear the Kid. He excused himself and left the porch to see whether any food was being served yet. The Kid's grasp was tight and leathery, but Leaner managed to pry himself loose. In the kitchen, the cake was cooling on a platter. It had turned green in the oven, and Amelia was complaining about its appearance.
“Cakes shouldn't be green,” she said. “I'm not a bit proud of it, but my children wanted to add blueberries to an orange cake, so what could I do?”
“Don't worry about it, Amelia,” Leaner said seriously, taking a large slice and stuffing it in his mouth. “It's delicious, and you can save some in the freezer for St. Patrick's Day. Go outside and relax.” Ignoring his own advice, he deserted the kitchen and tried the door of the downstairs bathroom. He was locked out. He climbed the flight of stairs to the other bathroom, but it was in use as well. He waited outside the door a minute, then entered the room he was staying in. From the window he could see the assembled Leaner clan. Food was being carried out on paper plates, and makeshift seats were filling up. Leaner surveyed the group from the window. They weren't a bad-looking bunch. He wondered which of the women was Rose, his cousin the juggler. He heard the bathroom door open but stayed at the window, resting his elbows on the sill as he peered about.
The Kid was sitting in a chair and looking into the air as if he were watching a flight of high-altitude geese. He may have been studying the clouds. Suddenly he spotted Leaner in the window and leaped from his seat, pointing.
“There he is!” he shouted. “Whatcha doing up there, Tex?”
“I'm just thinking,” Leaner called back.
“What about, Tex?”
Leaner was imagining his backyard at home, wondering whether Lauren was transforming it into a practice arena for Bingo and the dog. He didn't want to go into it with Kid Doolin at the moment. “Just thinking,” Leaner repeated.
He moved away from the window and went to the bathroom. When he was washing up, there was a knock on the door. “Just a minute,” he said, looking at himself in the mirror while toweling his hands dry. He found a brush and ran it through his hair. When he finished he held back the hair above his forehead to examine whether the hairline was retreating. This was the first time he had ever done this. It was only an exercise in curiosity, he told himself. He had no anxiety about growing old. He opened the door, and Amelia was standing there with her arms crossed.
“What's the matter?” she asked. “Was there bad news from home? I didn't even ask.”
“She bought a monkey, Amelia. It's probably shitting on my pillow by now.”
Leaner almost immediately regretted using an obscenity in front of his older sister, then realized that she was not offended in the least. She was accustomed to such language, he thought, being involved in the music industry.
“So you're all right, then,” she said. “I saw you in the window and heard that cryptic statement you made.”
“I didn't mean to be cryptic, Amelia. Everything is fine.”
“Good,” Amelia said. She let down her arms and squeezed his hand. “Come get some food before it's all gone.”
When he seated himself on the porch, Leaner was relieved to see that the Kid had found someone else to bombard with his questions and opinions. He was probably a nice little man. Maybe parties fired him up, which was understandable. He waved a friendly chicken wing at the Kid, and the Kid pointed his finger back at him like a pistol, firing off a couple of imaginary shots.
“You're Thurmond?” a man asked.
Leaner tucked some potato salad into his cheek and nodded.
“I'm Vernon Leaner,” the man said. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Same here,” Leaner said. “I was telling Amelia yesterday that I didn't know there were any more Leaners up here. It's very surprising.”
“We're not too plentiful anymore,” Vernon said, shaking his head. “You probably don't remember this, but I've met you before. I went down to Houston for a funeral.”
“Oh, yes, I do remember that. We had you over to the house?”
“That's right. I had dinner with you and your folks.” Vernon looked at Leaner. “You know, you've grown.”
Leaner laughed, a restrained laugh so as not to offend Vernon. “I was only twelve,” he said.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I remodel houses,” Leaner said. “And I'm trying to be a pro golfer. My first tournament is in New York in a few days. How about yourself? What do you do?”
“I grow Christmas trees,” Vernon told him. “Got about a hundred acres. I tell you, you really have to budget doing something like that. One sale has to last you the whole year. Course, if I wanted to, I could strip-mine my land. A coal company talked to me about it. They said it's solid coal under the surface. Hell, I already knew that. That's hardly a reason to tear up the land. Not just for money.”
“That's admirable,” Leaner said. “I mean that.”
Heck,” Vernon said, “some things you just can't replace. After strip-mining they put the dirt back in the holes or rebuild your hill, but it's not the same. When Amelia bought this property, we worried that she'd sell her coal, but she feels like we do. Some things are just more important. And let me tell you something else. I don't like unions, either. I don't know how you feel about them, but I don't like them. My grandfather worked in a mine around the turn of the century. He pumped air into the shafts. When some of the miners went on strike, he was sympathetic. But he stayed on the job. He couldn't suffocate a man just because he disagreed with him. Anyway, the strikers finally won, and my grandfather was blacklisted. He never worked another day in his life.” Vernon emphasized his punch line with squinted eyes and a Walter Brennan nod of affirmation.
“That's awful,” Leaner said, pushing away his plate. “I guess what he should have done was to make it clear to everyone else that he didn't know about them, but that the air pump would be out of service until further notice. That might have made up a few minds.”
“Wouldn't have worked,” Vernon said. “Some martyr would still go down there.”
Leaner found the conversation increasingly depressing. Vernon went on from the mining story to more tales of destitution, disease and hard luck. Most of the incidents didn't even occur to people Vernon knew. He usually prefaced a tragedy with, “I heard about this family in Kentucky...” or, “There was this thing in a magazine I saw...”
“...so he was found innocent, but meanwhile he'd spent fourteen years at hard labor. Legal fees and court costs would keep him broke for the rest of his life, which he ended by drowning himself in a bathtub.”
“What can I say?” Leaner said. “Life can be tough.”
“You bet it can,” punctuated again with that squint and nod.
Leaner looked around for some way to escape Vernon's company before being convinced to slash his wrists out of sympathy for a particularly horrible event. He picked up his plate and carried his scraps to the kitchen. Amelia was there laughing with a guest and threw her arm around him as he was walking by. “Tell me the truth,” she said to the woman. “Do my brother and I look like each other?”
“Well, yes,” the woman said. “Around the eyes especially. You both have those youthful Leaner good looks. You could even be the same age, but I know better.”
“How old are you?” Leaner asked his sister.
She smiled. “The name should give it away. Daddy was not so secretly in love with Amelia Earhart. As a public figure, you understand, and I was named after her. Maybe that's not such a hint, because I was born ages after her plane crashed.”
“Oh, yes. That was back in my day, Amelia.”
“I'm forty,” Amelia said. “You dragged it out of me. The big four-oh. Tell Thurmond what you were telling me about the origin of the family name.”
“There are a couple of theories,” the woman said. “One is that our noble ancestor had an unpronounceable German name, and after a game of horseshoes, he was given the name Leaner. A leaner is when the horseshoe just leans on the stake. It's not a complete miss, in other words.”
“That's pretty hard to swallow,” Leaner said.
“Yeah? Tell it to the Ringers. Another story is that our namesake got into an argument with a butcher over the quality of the meat. Seems the butcher was giving him too much fat, and in his broken English, our ancestor kept yelling, 'Leaner! Leaner!'”
“That's no better,” Leaner said.
“I agree,” the woman said. “Theory Number Three. We found some old letters once, and the name on the envelopes was Loehner. L-o-e-h-n-e-r. The name was changed to sound more American.”
“I'll go with that,” Leaner said.
Dorothy Doolin rushed in to the kitchen now, looking flushed and frantic.
“Have you see the Kid?” she asked. “No one outside has seen him for half an hour. Is he in here?”
“He must be,” Amelia assured her. “Thurmond, get Dorothy a glass of water. I'll look through the house.”
Leaner filled a coffee mug from the tap, and Dorothy sat down at the table with it. “This just isn't like the Kid,” she said. “He's too fond of people to go off by himself. Oh, what if he's wandered away and gotten himself lost or hurt?”
Vernon came in now and asked about the Kid just as Amelia was descending the stairs, shaking her head. Leaner saw Vernon's eyes squint and knew that bad news was on the way.
“This happened to a fellow in Yellowstone once,” Vernon said. “He got torn apart by bears.”
Dorothy Doolin burst into tears.
Word spread quickly of the Kid's disappearance. The children made a fruitless search of the vehicles in the driveway. People were milling about everywhere, and when Charles and Jean reported their news to the household that the Kid was not asleep in one of the cars, Dorothy Doolin could be heard from across the meadow, acting as if the Kid's bear-claw-riddled body had turned up in a clump of brush. A man Leaner hadn't met felt obligated to take charge, and stood on a living room chair to be heard.
“Everyone, may I have your attention?” he was saying. “If you haven't already heard, Kid Doolin has disappeared. I'm asking anyone who feels up to it to start a search. If you're not familiar with the property, it's easy to lose your sense of direction. That's probably what happened to the Kid. He's just a little turned around out there and needs some help coming home. I would like most of you to stay here. There's no need for more of us to get lost. If the Kid shows up while we're out in the woods, start honking the car horns so we'll know he's safe. This is not a crisis, and that may bear repeating.” The man waited a moment, studying the group. “This is not a crisis.”
Dorothy Doolin screamed.
A six-man posse spread out from the house. Leaner and Vernon walked across the meadow together before parting, but it was time enough for Vernon to recollect two additional horror stories, one about a skier who had broken both legs above the knees ten miles from the nearest telephone, covering the distance in three days by pulling himself along over rocks and bushes hand over hand, mile by mile. “Then there was that pregnant woman who got raped by that motorcycle gang from Illinois,” Vernon told him. “There were about twenty of them, and they acted like a bunch of animals.”
“What does that have to do with the Kid?” Leaner asked.
“She miscarried, too,” Vernon finished it off. “Just thought you might want to know, that's what.”
Leaner gave Vernon the slip and found a creek and began to follow a path that ran alongside it. He was only a few yards from the meadow but the house was already obscured from view. The ground was very dry and he wasn't certain that he would be able to recognize any footprints. “Kid,” he called out. “Kid Doolin.” For some reason Leaner was looking in trees. He wasn't paying close attention to what he was doing, and stepped into the edge of the creek. Jesus, what am I doing, tromping around in a forest in the Keystone State looking for the ancient husband of a distant relative. He cupped his hands and shouted as loudly as he could, “Hello, Kid Doo-ooo-lin!” Calling out to the Kid sounded like a song. “Oh, you Ki-i-i-id!”
He was getting so far from the house that he was sure the Kid couldn't have gone such a distance without hearing his calls. He decided to circle back in another direction, noting that if he himself should become lost there would always be the creek to give him his bearings.
He ended up on the iron ore road about a half-mile from the driveway and, giving the Kid credit for taking the easiest route, walked down the middle of it toward the house. He sang out the Kid's name about every ten seconds, but there was never an answer.
As Leaner rounded a curve, he saw him about fifty yards ahead. The Kid was down on his knees and appeared to be clutching his throat. Leaner began to sprint, not really sure what he would do if the Kid was having an attack of some kind. He was already thinking about scooping up the Kid without breaking stride, throwing the little man over his shoulder and whisking him away to the safety of the house. The Kid heard Leaner running toward him and stood up to see what the noise was. Leaner immediately saw that he was fine and nonchalantly slowed to a brisk walk, saying, “Kid Doolin.”
“Hey, there, Tex. You look out of breath.”
“Everyone's worried about you. You didn't tell a soul where you were going.”
“Kid Doolin can take care of himself,” he said. “I've just been eating berries. They're best when you pick them right off the bush and pop them in your mouth.”
“Your wife is really upset. And I can't say that Vernon put her mind to rest any.”
“That Vernon Leaner,” the kid sneered as they headed toward the house. “He's a blue-blond horse's ass.”
When they turned in the driveway Leaner could hear the cheers from the porch, and car horns began sounding their arrival. A crowd rushed to greet them, led by Dorothy Doolin wiping her running mascara from her cheeks. People were slapping both Leaner and the Kid on their backs. Soon the other searchers had returned, congratulating Leaner with handshakes and smiles.
And, fittingly, very soon thereafter the reunion was over.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING Leaner was overcome by a lethargy that took him by surprise. It would suit him just fine to stay in bed all day, dozing now and then, spending his waking hours watching the breeze blow the curtains above his bed. He lay on his side, seeing the tops of the trees through the window, marveling at how the temperature was like a Texas autumn.
There was a knock at the door, and one of the children asked if he was “up and at 'em” yet. From behind the door, he couldn't tell if it was the boy or the girl.
“I'm awake,” he said, watching the shadow at the foot of the door.
“When do you think we can go pick berries and practice your golf?”
“I'll be down in a minute,” Leaner said.
He helped himself to coffee but passed up breakfast once again. The conversation in progress centered on the excitement of the family reunion. Leaner was drinking his coffee black, but he stirred it around with his spoon anyway.
“It was pretty irresponsible,” Amelia was saying. “Even cruel, for the Kid to pull his vanishing act like that. He ought to be ashamed of himself.”
Leaner shrugged. “Oh, I don't know,” he said. “No harm done, really.”
Charles and Jean were waiting outside for Leaner with a couple of Mason jars for the berries. Leaner shouldered his golf bag, and as soon as he was out the door, both children were asking to carry his clubs. Leaner explained to them that the clubs weren't so heavy when you first picked them up, but they could really get to you after a while. “I've been carrying them a long time,” he said. “You have to know what you're doing or you'll hurt yourself.”
As they climbed a hill spotted with loose ground cover and hip-fracturing gullies, Leaner was thankful that Kid Doolin hadn't meandered over this way. He probably would have broken something, and in addition to whatever misery he might experience as a result of the accident, it would just become more fodder for Vernon's repertoire of horror tales.
“You know what?” Jean said.
“What?” said Leaner.
“We're almost there.”
Leaner had to hand it to his young niece and nephew. They certainly knew a good place to hit golf balls. Ancient poles of roughly hewn timber extended to the horizon at the abandoned power line. It was the only unobstructed view of any distance on the property, and it looked perfect for using as a driving range, although scrub brush and small pine seedlings were beginning to reclaim the space.
Leaner took out his driver and teed up a ball. At last he had some time on the trip that he could consider his own.
“Y'all stay over here where you won't catch my backswing. After I hit all of the balls we can go see how many we can find. They're real cheap practice balls, so it doesn't matter how many we lose.”
“It's sort of like an Easter egg hunt,” Charles said.
“No, it's not,” his sister argued. “This is work.”
Leaner took a couple of practice swings, hoping to stay within the narrow confines of the right-of-way with his shots. He wasn't famous for his distance, which was only above average-or, as a matter of fact, famous for anything else at this point in his life. But he was an accurate shooter. The path his balls flew was almost always arrow-straight, except when he wanted to fade or draw.
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other like a cat sinking its claws into its favorite rug, then let go with the first drive, and the children were flabbergasted, both of them jumping in place. “Wow!” Charles said. “How far did that go?”
“Six hundred yards,” Leaner dead-panned.
“Six hundred yards! Wow!”
“It didn't go half that far,” Jean protested. “God, Pee-wee, you believe anything.”
“Don't call me Pee-wee,” Charles said.
“Here we go again,” Leaner said. “Y'all watch.”
He was machinelike in his precision, and the youngsters were a great little gallery, squealing and shouting at every shot like they were at a fireworks display. He hit all the balls he had brought with him, and when it was time to shag them the children raced on ahead of him and counted them as they picked them up. Out of the fifty balls, they had found all but six, and when Leaner hit them back the other way, only two more were lost. The reason they were having such an easy time of it was that Leaner placed most of them from the tee within a radius of no more than ten steps. He was very pleased.
Leaner began to use his irons, explaining why there were so many, how each had a different loft used for various combinations of angle and distance and lie. They were attentive but never once asked if they could try out the clubs themselves. Actually they were dying to, but Amelia had earlier laid down the law about keeping their hands off of them.
Just as Leaner was about to hit one of the last balls, an unexpected movement distracted him, and the ball flew out of control into the woods a hundred yards down the line. Three deer the size of mules bolted across the area, followed by a fawn that stopped in the clearing and gave the people its full attention, both ears cocked. Charles waved his arms and yelled, and the fawn leaped into the woods, followed by the other deer.
“Why'd you do that?” Leaner asked him.
“To make him scared of people,” he said. “If he stands still like that in November, someone's bound to shoot him.”
“Hunters trespass on your land?”
“Yeah, we don't even come up here in the winter. People are all over the place with guns.”
Jean had been staring at a point past where the deer had appeared, in the vicinity of where the golf ball had gone. “Something fell, back in there,” she said. “And it was bigger than a tree limb. I saw it go down.”
“Well,” Leaner said, “let's go have a look.”
They walked to the general area and began rooting around, and after a few minutes Charles found the ball. While he was examining it, Jean let out a shriek worthy of Dorothy Doolin.
“Thurmond, come quick!”
Leaner hopped over a couple of logs to see what the daily crisis mill had turned up for him this time. Jean was sitting on the ground cradling the head of an unconscious young man in her lap. “Is he dead, Uncle Thurmond?” she asked, wide-eyed.
Leaner was still a few steps away but was already denying to himself any serious injury to the boy. He bent over him, noticing a huge bump square in the center of his forehead. “He's not dead,” he said emphatically. “He's been beaned by a ball, that's all.” Leaner lifted each of the eyelids because he'd seen it done so often in the movies. He didn't know what he was supposed to be looking for, and he found the act somehow upsetting, too intimate. The youth was wearing hand-woven clothing, all black, and a yellow straw hat lay nearby. “Do you have any idea who he is?”
“It's Jonah,” Charles said. “He lives on the other side of our land.”
“What is he? Amish?”
“No, the Amish are about twenty miles from here. He's something like that, though. Look, he's moving.”
“Hold still,” Leaner told the young man. “Don't try to talk.” This was another holdover from the movies.
Jonah pulled his legs up and sat on the ground, massaging his forehead, while Leaner and the two children observed him. “What time is it?” Jonah managed to say.
“Before noon,” Leaner said. “How do you feel?”
“Dizzy.” Jonah spoke haltingly with a remote, nondescript accent. “What has happened? I was watching you hit the balls with those rods of yours. Then some deer ran before me. I saw them run away. Now I find myself on the ground.”
“They're not rods,” Jean spoke out. “They're called clubs. Golf clubs. And the balls are golf balls. You got hit by one of them.”
Leaner nodded apologetically.
“So that is the golf,” Jonah said. “I have a radio, and once listened to the golf over it.”
Charles nudged his sister, whispering “He's pretty nutty,” and they both giggled.
“Try and stand up,” Leaner told him. “I'll take you home. It's the least I can do after beaning you.”
“Beaning?” Jonah asked.
“It's my fault you're hurt,” Leaner said, lifting the boy's arm over his shoulder. “Let's get to my car.”
Jonah pulled himself away. “No automobiles,” he said. “They are against our beliefs.” He then became silent. Occasionally he stumbled, but his walk was steady. Leaner, carrying his bag by its shoulder strap, was ready to catch Jonah should he fall. He felt miserable.
“What lousy luck,” he said.
“I must go home,” said Jonah. “I have sinned, and this awful thing is my punishment. I must go home.”
“What'd he say?” Jean asked.
“He could be delirious, or have a slight concussion,” Leaner told her. “Don't put too much stock in what he says right now.”
Just as their feet stepped onto the road, Jonah swooned dramatically, toppling Leaner and his clubs. Leaner picked him up fireman-style, thinking he might throw out his back in the process, be washed up as a pro before he even got started. Charles immediately picked up the golf bag. It was a real effort for the youngster.
“Hey, Thurmond,” Jean said. “If Jonah dies, are they going to arrest you for murder? I mean, we saw you do it. I know it was an accident, but you never can tell what a jury will say.”
“Jean,” Leaner said, “will you carry this kid's hat for me? It keeps scraping on my neck.”
“I'll carry it,” she said. “What do they call someone that helps a killer kill somebody?”
“An accessory after the fact,” Leaner said. “And if you keep asking me stuff like that, I'm going to start laughing and drop him.”
Back at the house, Leaner opened the car door with his free hand and laid Jonah out in the back seat. The children were already screaming the news to Amelia, who got into the car with them as Leaner started the engine. “We've got to get this kid to a hospital,” he said, “and X-ray that head of his.” As he drove off it occurred to him that his life path had hit rocky ground somewhere in Florida, which was where he had tried for five years to qualify as a professional golfer. Ultimately he had made it, but the Sunshine State was fixed in his mind as a threatening terrain and he never wanted to go back there. Now just about every snag he fell into was linked in his mind with Florida.
When they were a couple of miles down the road, Jonah began to stir in the back seat. He sat up, clenching the armrest as if he were bracing for a ride aboard a Saturn rocket.
“Anyway,” Leaner was saying to Amelia, “Jean said she saw something fall in the woods, and we found this fellow knocked out. I came close to hitting a spectator in a tournament once, but never imagined such a thing in an out-of-the-way place like this. I mean, the odds...”
Amelia looked over her shoulder to the back seat. “Did the kids tell you anything about him?”
“Just his name,”
“I bought a quilt from his family. They really do nice work, and some of the men make beautiful furniture. I'm surprised that he was so far from home. Sometimes that group of his, and the Amish as well, encourage the younger ones to raise a little hell to get it out of their systems. He was probably rebelling a bit, going off by himself like that.”
“What were you doing so far from home?” Leaner asked into the rear-view mirror.
“I was taking a walk when I should have been working the field.”
“He was just taking a walk,” Amelia repeated, as if a translation had been called for. “Well, I don't know what they think of modern medical practices. They have a cut-off date of about 1850. Any technology in service up to that point is fine and dandy. You're right, though. He needs X-raying.”
They drove into the emergency entrance of the clinic in Kane and assisted Jonah out of the car. He could walk by himself but still had quite a knot on his face. The children stayed in the car. Leaner was the first one in the building and approached a nurse at a desk. “Head X-ray, no insurance, cash payment.”
His terse delivery seemed to work. Jonah was led to a back room, Amelia going along with him. Leaner pulled out some traveler's checks. “I'm sorry,” the nurse said. “We absolutely cannot accept that as payment. Now, if you were covered by some form of hospitalization or accident benefits-“
“Oh, come on,” Leaner said, “the bank must already be closed. These things are as good as cash.”
“Not here, they're not,” the nurse said firmly.
Amelia was at the desk now. “They want to examine him alone,” she said. “Any problem here?”
“They won't take my traveler's check,” Leaner complained.
“You're joking,” Amelia said, looking at the nurse. “Is Doctor Clark on duty today? He'll take my brother's check.”
Something struck a responsive chord in the nurse, and she nearly tore the bill from Leaner's grasp. Leaner assumed that Clark must be a local medical bigwig, and while he wasn't that fond of name-dropping, he had to admit it had its advantages. He wished Amelia would try it again. Maybe that would knock a few bucks off the total.
An intern approached them from down the hall. “Good news,” he said. “There's no evidence of a fracture, but he probably has a mild concussion. The boy should get a couple of days rest.”
“Where is he now?” Amelia asked him.
“Getting his clothes on,” the intern said. “He'll be out in a moment.”
Leaner was wondering why the boy had to undress for a head X-ray, and thought of the time he had gone to an unfamiliar doctor for a school physical and been made to strip to his socks and shoes. After checking only Leaner's ears, the doctor had told him, “That'll be all for today.” While Leaner was pulling on his pants he asked the doctor if he had enjoyed himself. “Yes and no,” the doctor had shot back, “and be careful how you talk.”
“Say,” the intern said after studying Amelia. “You're on television, aren't you? You're in that series about the ocean liner?”
“No,” Amelia said, folding her arms as she looked down the hall. “Here he comes. Over here, Jonah. We'll take you home.”
It was a good thirty-minute drive over to Jonah's community. Jonah had protested that he really shouldn't be riding in a car, but Leaner suggested to him that it might be part of his punishment. Charles and Jean were old hands as car passengers, but they were impressed by the farm they were entering. A hillside and pasture had been cleared by generations past, and a compound of buildings surrounded a central windmill. Leaner looked at the ancient barn, doubting that he could be up to duplicating such a structure if one of his house remodeling jobs ever called for it. Some men and women were working a fine field of crops with hand tools, and one could be seen plowing behind a horse. They were all dressed in simple black or gray, the men wearing stiff white straw hats like Jonah's, the women covering their heads with scarves. Leaner drove almost to the front door of one building, where an old man with a flowing white beard was sharpening the blade of a scythe. He looked like he was posing for a Quaker Oats cereal box.
“That's grandfather,” Jonah said.
“He looks like Father Time,” said Leaner, catching Amelia's elbow in his ribs.
The grandfather stood and walked toward the car. Jonah fumbled with the handle to the door on his side of the car, but became so frustrated by it that he climbed out the window.
“Look at him,” Jean said. “I can't believe he did that. Boy!”
“Excuse me, sir,” Leaner addressed the man. “Jonah had an accident a few miles from here. He was hit on the head, and we took him to the hospital in Kane. The doctor said he should rest up for a few days. I got him a soft drink, and he already looks much better. So maybe he should just stay in bed, listen to his radio and relax.”
“Thank you for returning him,” the man said before accompanying his grandson inside.
Amelia was shaking her head as they drove slowly from the farm.
“That was some little speech you made there, Thurmond,” she said. “I know your intentions were good, but you shouldn't have mentioned the drink and the radio. These people are very strict. It's frivolous for one of them even to turn up the brim of his hat. It's a form of bragging. And God forbid that they should sanction lying around listening to the radio. Oh, well.”
“Maybe that isn't the life for Jonah,” Leaner said.
“He might leave,” Amelia said. “He's about the right age for it. That group of his, I can never remember the name of it, anyway, they have a lot of things that make sense. They have voluntary baptism at the age of twenty-one. That's a good idea. Something like that ought to be a decision rather than being forced on a baby.”
“Does that mean we don't have to go to church this Sunday?” Charles asked from the rear.
Amelia didn't answer him. “I've heard that most of the youngsters come back on their own anyway, after a taste of the outside.”
“I can't say as I entirely blame them,” Leaner said.
THE GREENING OF THURMOND LEANER in its entirety is available as an ebook.
“M.H.” Meets President Harding
1
DEBBIE TELEPHONED THIS MORNING, AS SHE DOES every morning. Debbie is a volunteer, a member of a group of charitable people that has taken it upon itself to phone old men and women who live alone to make sure they are still alive. I do not mind the calls. In fact, I look forward to the ring of the telephone. The pleasures and activities of a man as he approaches a century of life can be somewhat restricted.
When she calls, I have already been up for hours. Early in the day, I tend my vegetable garden, and my conversations with Debbie have a definite agricultural slant to them. You might say that the garden is the center of my life. It is not only a conversation piece; it also satisfies my need for exercise and my taste for fresh vegetables. For a person like myself living on a fixed income, a garden can be a near-necessity.
I was born in 1892. My doctor tells me that I am in excellent physical condition for a man of my age. He says I have the body of a seventy-year-old. My doctor is the funniest man alive. I am not without a sense of humor myself. My faithful companion is my Irish setter, a dog as red as a fire engine whose name is Blue. Blue runs in circles around me when I work in the yard, picking black-eyed peas or corn or squash. At this time of year, which is autumn, Blue runs in circles around me when I pick pecans off the ground. Oh yes, the doctor has said my mind is still fine. He says I am as sharp as a tack, but I wouldn't know about that.
Memory is a funny thing. It is my understanding that when a body cell dies, a new cell forms and replaces it. This is a constant thing, this cellular relay race we call growth and aging. After six or seven years, each and every cell in your body has been replaced. But memory hangs as tough as a barnacle, passing along through the various stages of life, somehow not losing its way in the shuffle, as do hair cells and good eyesight.
I have outgrown a dozen bodies since 1892, and as near as I can tell, my memory is fairly intact. I find this fact utterly remarkable, almost miraculous. Exactly what is a recollection from long ago? It is like newsreels of marching doughboys on Fifth Avenue at the end of the Great War. Movement is stiff and jerky. A wave from someone in the ranks becomes a flyswat. Confetti clouds the air. Smells and sounds are muted in black and white. Memory is an old man standing in a creek, water to his knees. See that shadow on the bottom, filtered through murky, flowing water and cast on uneven rocks? That is memory. It is up to my interpretation to say what these shadows are. The face reflected is hardly my own.
To answer the question of why this particular memory I will shortly describe remains intact, well, it was simply the highlight of my life. It was an adventure. I was in love. I was not an old-timer unearthing new potatoes. Let me remove my present self, then. Let me step back, at least for now, until my focus is sharp. I will crack pecans and comb Blue's ears.
It is 1923
2
SIDNEY MARTIN HALVERTON WAS A SUPERVISOR WITH the Trenton Canvas Company. He oversaw workers whose job it was to manufacture boat sails, store awnings, tents of every size, camp stools and deck chairs, trampolines, tarpaulins, even lamp shades and boxing ring mats. In the event of rain in the 1923 World Series, wherever it would be played, chances were that the field would be protected by canvas assembled in the Trenton factory.
In the beginning of April, a sketch for twenty tents reached Halverton's desk. The plans called for six designs of various sizes, including an enormous dining tent. Halverton unrolled the plans, anchoring the paper with ink bottles, erasers and pads. He bit off a chew of tobacco and made notes on the most efficient and least complicated method of producing the job. He saw that the order was being billed to Mr. Thomas Edison in nearby West Orange, and it gave Halverton great satisfaction to know that his work would end up in the hands of such a man. He had read that Edison, now 76 years old, had been in Florida since the first of the year in poor health.
He gave the tent order priority, and it was filled within two weeks under Halverton's supervision. Another week passed. The tents had been trucked to West Orange, and Halverton was at work on a huge order from the Ringling circus. He happened to glance from his desk in his glass-enclosed office. There was an entourage worming its way through the work area, and Halverton was astonished to see Thomas Edison among its members. Halverton opened the office door and watched him. Edison's features were without a trace of illness, his eyes vibrant. As various machines and procedures were pointed out to him, Edison would cup a hand behind one ear. But the noise of the machinery was overpowering, and Edison was all but deaf. Halverton joined the group now and was introduced to the famed inventor. After shaking hands, he tapped on Edison's wrist in Morse code, “Good morning, sir.”
Edison beamed. “Ah, a man who speaks my language!” The old telegrapher latched radio crew aboard the USS Delaware during the World War, and on to Halverton's arm for the remainder of the tour. Halverton had been part of the radio crew aboard the USS Delaware during the World War, and though he had not used his knowledge of Morse code since his discharge from the Navy, he was able to tap out the highlights of the factory for their guest. Edison wanted to know all sorts of things, from the life expectancy of the average needle to the components of a waterproofing compound used on some of the tarps. When he asked who their most difficult customer was, Halverton named the present one, Ringling.
“The circus,” Edison said. “Myself, I prefer large-scale problems. The larger the better.”
The group posed for photographers in front of the building, some of them holding their hats. Their expressions were more serious than the situation demanded. Someone helped Edison into his car, and he motioned for Halverton from the front seat.
“I want to thank you personally for the work on the tents,” he said, almost shouting. “I'd like you to join us on the campout if you can.”
“I'd be honored,” Halverton said. At that moment he would have walked away from his job had Edison asked.
“It'll be the first part of June,” Edison added. “There's a part of West Virginia the crowds haven't discovered yet. The caravan disembarks from West Orange. We can send a vehicle for you, or you can drive your own car. If it's a Ford.”
Halverton smiled. “It's a Ford,” he said.
“Good,” Edison laughed. “Henry won't allow us to bring nothing but Fords. You just write down where a letter can reach you, and I'll see you get instructions for the trip.”
A picture of Edison and Halverton appeared in the paper the following morning. It was reported that an invitation had been extended to Halverton for the campout in June. Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone and possibly President Harding were expected to be among the campers.
Sid Halverton felt like fainting when he read his name in association with those luminaries. He bought several copies of the paper and mailed clippings to his relatives. At work, he was kidded about hobnobbing with the upper crust.
The following Sunday, Halverton played the piano for an hour at the YMCA. He then took in a double bill, a forgettable feature shored up with a fine unbilled Stan Laurel Comedy. Halverton laughed out loud more than once in the darkened theater, and as he rode the streetcar to the park, he found himself in a pleasant and receptive mood.
He unbuttoned his collar and lay in the grass, watching a group of children kicking a ball. He leaned on his side, lost in thought. So deep was he into his reverie that he failed to notice where the woman had come from. In fact, he wasn't conscious of her at all until he realized he was staring at her. Her dress was softly fluttering in the afternoon breeze like a flag. She was majestically tall, and he could see in the few steps that she took, graceful. She was slim, with radiant amber skin. Her black, black hair was tied above her, accented here and there with single strands of grey. She was, perhaps, forty years old. Halverton couldn't take his eyes from her.
Plainly, he was attracted to her at first sight. But protocol of the day prevented him from speaking out and introducing himself. It just wasn't done. In the war, it was easy. On leave in London and Aberdeen, Halverton could sit at a piano, give a wink, tap the bench lightly with his hand, and he'd have a girl on each side for the rest of the night. When he thought about it, that's what war was to him - total abandonment of all manners. If society permitted a young man to kill, it certainly wasn't about to frown on his attempts to find companionship and love. The leeway there came with the territory. He would be crazy to say that he missed the war, but if Halverton was honest with himself, and he usually was, he had to admit that some of it wasn't so bad.
But lying there in the park, who was there to censure him, other than himself? If he didn't speak, the moment would be gone.
“You're very pretty,” he said.
She caught his eyes with her own and seemed to smile.
“That's an awful thing to blurt out to a total stranger, I know. If it embarrasses you, I apologize right here and now. But any man within a mile of here would say the same thing if he spoke his mind. You are very pretty.”
“Do you always speak your mind?” she asked him.
“Of course not,” he said.
“Not when you wish to spare the feelings of those you care about,” she said.
Halverton brought himself to his feet and found himself straightening his clothes. “That's right,” he said. Suddenly, he was the self-conscious one. She recognized his discomfort.
“That's nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. “I wish more people cared enough to be a little less than honest. I've always believed that absolute honesty will bring pain, sooner or later. I say, if you care about someone, make them feel good. Learn to lie to them now and then.”
Halverton smiled at the remark. There was something in the cockeyed logic he liked. He didn't know whether she was serious or just trying to be entertaining. But he knew he liked her. He liked talking with her. And she really was very pretty. No, she was beautiful.
3
IF QUESTIONED ON THE CHARACTER OF HER boarders, Mrs. Meek was quick to point out that, when Prohibition was about to be enacted, only one, Sidney Halverton, had not run wildly into the streets for one last legal bottle. If pressed, she would further state that she not only believed Halverton to be a teetotaler, but that he had never taken a woman to his room. Prone to exaggerate, Mrs. Meek could truthfully say with the flair of a Holy Roller testimonial that not a single creditor had knocked on her door looking for Halverton since he had moved there in 1919.
And if asked of her own marital status, or of the whereabouts of Mr. Meek, she would not utter a sound until the subject was changed.
Halverton stopped for a shoeshine on the way to Margarete's hotel and entered the expense in a meticulously kept ledger he carried in his vest. “Shine .15,” he wrote. Accumulated during the week were such investments as: Tobacco .10, Stamps .20, Lunch .45, Moving Picture .50, Haircut .30. Halverton's handwriting was a piece of art, flowing and rolling with such beauty that an illiterate could appreciate it at a glance.
Stopping to adjust his tie in the window of a shop, he absentmindedly whistled a song that was sweeping the country, its lyrics as simple as the tune. The words went:
Yes, we have no bananas,
We have no bananas today
We have stringbeans and onions,
Cabbages and scallions,
All kinds of fruit, and say. . .
Yes, we have no bananas,
We have no bananas today.
Margarete was a striking woman. Halverton had called for her from the lobby, and as she descended the stairs to greet him, his were only one pair of eyes among a dozen men's that watched her. She moved like a feather floating to earth.
When he had first walked her to the hotel, Margarete had told him that she was Dutch. This frankly astonished Halverton, since she didn't have a trace of an accent. She went on to say that she was in Trenton visiting a distant relative of hers.
“My cousin was to join us, but he was suddenly taken ill,” she told him. “I'm afraid he's indisposed for the evening.”
“I hope it's not serious,” Halverton said.
“No,” Margarete said. “Vincent has a flair for the dramatic and a low resistance to pain. I've seen a headache put him to bed for two days. I have decided that he is a very odd fellow, and if one had a say in such matters, I would never choose him as a relative. Shall we go?”
In the restaurant, Halverton was at a loss for words. He was so taken with Margarete's appearance, her hair, the flush in her face, her amber skin, her presence, that he didn't know whether to make conversation by saying that his sister had bobbed her hair or that he had met Edison.
“I met Thomas Edison last week.”
“Really?” Margarete said. “What was he like?”
“Very nice,” Halverton answered. “I'm sure he's been taken advantage of through the years. Because of his fame and all. But he seemed to me to be unspoiled by all the attention. I liked him.”
“How did you meet him?”
“It was through a project that the company I work for did for him. We made him some tents, and he invited me on his campout in June. It's an annual event for him. Henry Ford's supposed to be there as well.”
Margarete fanned herself with a menu. “You have some high-class friends,” she said.
“I just met Mr. Edison,” Halverton said. “I'm no big shot. But I'll tell you something. I don't mind being a wage-earner. I know that you're supposed to have the ambition to own the company one day, but I like my job. I've had it since I was discharged from the Navy in Boston. That may show a lack of aggressiveness, but so be it. Being in charge of the whole works sounds like nothing but headaches to me.”
“Where are you from, Sid?”
“Texas,” Halverton said. “Houston. My father's in politics down there. Right now, he's a city commissioner. He used to represent our ward as an alderman when the city was set up that way. He gets his name on plaques set into buildings and bridges, and he does a lot of good. I'm proud of him. He's a Democrat. If he loses an election, someone just appoints him to a post. In Houston, I'm known as H.A. Halverton's son. And that's fine with me. I have a brother and three sisters back home too.”
“And why did you not marry some nice Houston girl?” Margarete asked.
“I was going to,” he said. “I was on leave in Aberdeen, Scotland, when her letter arrived. She married a friend of mine. They have two children now.”
“I used to be married,” Margarete said. “I found out how little I knew him in a year. He was French. He became an officer and died in the trenches.”
“The war was the worst thing that has ever happened,” Halverton said. “That must have been terrible for you.”
“He used to beat me,” she said blankly, then a waiter arrived, and they ordered their food.
In the following weeks, Margarete did not mention her relative again, and Halverton did not inquire about the cousin. Perhaps she had invented him. She lived in the hotel, and whether or not her cousin actually existed was of no great concern to him. They took walks in the evenings of his workdays or sat in the porch furniture of Mrs. Meek's rooming house. Since they were respectable people, discretion was used. When they met at her hotel, it was usually for the night.
For the first time, Halverton was allowing his work at the canvas company to pile up. On weekends, he and Margarete would be found in the audience of a New York vaudeville show, bellylaughing along with the crowds. They saw Will Rogers in a matinee, bought tickets to the evening performance and were delighted to discover that he did not repeat a single joke. They wept with laughter when they saw the Marx Brothers on stage. Other days were spent at the ocean where they rented weekend cottages. He was spending money he didn't have, and he had lost his expense ledger.
Halverton's stomach ached. He did not sleep well, and he ate irregularly. His attention drifted. He was in love, and it was making him miserable.
4
WHEN HALVERTON RECEIVED EDISON'S CAMPING instructions in the mail, he mentioned to Margarete that he simply would not go without her.
“There's not a reason in the world for us to be apart,” he said.
“Sid, it's the middle of June and could hardly be hotter,” she said. “I don't like tents. I'm allergic to a variety of insect bites. It might be for men only, then where would I go?”
“It doesn't mean that much to me,” Halverton said. “If you won't come with me, then I'll stay here.”
“That's foolish,” she told him. “Can't you see that the men on this trip have shaped our society and are still writing our history? You have a rare chance to see them as few others are in a position to. Whenever you come across the name of Edison or Ford, you'll have the satisfaction of remembering them as you knew them. They will still impress you long after you've forgotten me.”
“Why do you say things like that?” he said. “I love you. There's no end to that.”
“You're in love with me,” she said. “And I don't expect you to be reasonable under the circumstances. You told me once you were no big shot. What do you think I am? I am the Dutch widow of a French soldier.” She removed a silver bracelet from her left wrist and showed her arm to Halverton. “It's a tattoo,” she said. “A snake swallowing its own tail. I used to dance the tango until dawn with young men who would be sent away to die, while my own husband was out there himself dying somewhere. Like all of Paris, I was starving. But I made the soldiers forget that they were dying, and they saw to it that I was well nourished. Over the years there have been many other men as well.”
One day Halverton hoped to marry. He just assumed it would happen. And he would have sons and daughters to bounce on his knee in his own home. In his gut he knew that Margarete was not the woman to fulfill that dream with him. You didn't marry a woman like her. But, somehow - at that moment - it didn't seem to matter. He couldn't imagine his life without her.
“I don't know why you're telling me all of this,” he said.
“Love is many things, Sidney,” she said. “That's all. When are you leaving?”
“The day after tomorrow.”
Margarete consented to accompany him, but made him promise that she could stay in a hotel if she became uncomfortable. This was fine with Halverton, since he was skeptical that they would be anywhere close to a hotel.
The morning of June nineteenth was cool - cool enough to drench the ground in dew and suspend a fog as thick as clouds in the low spots. Margarete wore a scarf to tie down her hat, and she had begun to look forward to the drive. Not owning a car of her own, it was a luxury for her to travel by private means. They were on the road to West Orange, where they would meet up with the start of Edison's caravan.
Halverton could never have found the actual campsite on his own, because Edison in his note had pinpointed it no more specifically than the Monongahela Forest, nearly a million acres of West Virginia's wilderness.
They drove onto the grounds of the huge Edison complex. It looked as if everyone had been given the morning off. Thousands of workers, in overalls, in lab coats and street clothes, were walking in one general direction, coming down every street and flowing together to form an enormous crowd.
“What do you think it is?” Halverton asked.
“I don't know,” Margarete answered, sitting high in her seat for a better view. “Ask somebody.”
Halverton pulled over to the curb. He stepped onto the running board and looked ahead as far as he could see. “What's all the excitement?” he asked of a passerby.
“The old man's getting a sendoff. On up ahead.”
Halverton sat in the car again.
“They're getting ready to leave. I don't know if we can drive through all these people.”
“You'll have to,” Margarete said. There was a panic in her voice. “Let's go, Sid. They'll get out of our way.”
Halverton stepped to the front of the car and cranked the engine, then idled his vehicle through the crowd. The workers were a genial bunch and willingly parted to allow them through. There was a line of three huge trucks overloaded like gypsy wagons and a string of cars in the rear of them that Halverton parked behind.
Then they saw Edison as he stood in the seat of the lead car. He made a short statement that Halverton was unable to make out, then waved his derby. Edison's employees, all 8000 of them, cheered enthusiastically. Halverton could hear a single voice sing out, “Hip hip,” followed by an artillery of hoorays. After three cheers Edison waved again. Then he sat down and the vehicles began to move. Hats sailed in the air.
“This is wonderful,” Margarete shouted, leaning over to kiss Halverton's cheek. “Thank you for talking me into it.”
They heard the enthusiasm of the employees dim with distance, and before long they found themselves back in Trenton, where they turned south to pass within two blocks of Mrs. Meek's house on Perry Street. Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington were obstacles in their path, and the circuitous route Edison had mapped led them around the larger cities. There were fifteen cars in all. Occasionally Margarete and Halverton caught a glimpse of Edison when there was a turn in the road and they were able to see a distance ahead.
“Look,” Margarete would say. “There he is again.”
“I see him,” Halverton would answer.
At the same time, another fleet of vehicles was traveling southeastward out of Columbiana, Ohio. Its cargo included one hundred cleaned and dressed chickens and dozens of cakes, pies and cookies prepared by Harvey Firestone's Aunt Nannie and the Columbiana Ladies Aid Society. Among the passengers were six cooks, three assistant cooks, a cameraman, two journalists, a Methodist bishop and various wives, sons and in-laws.
In the lead truck, which was equipped with an oversized refrigerator on one running board and an oven on the other, Firestone was making a point to his friend Henry Ford.
“Henry, I'm telling you it's balloon tires from here out,” he said. “They're safer, they give you a smoother ride, which won't make the car shake itself apart, and they cost a fraction of the amount to produce.”
“All right,” Ford said. “Now let me ask you this. What if one blows up when a man is changing it? What if an infant happened to crawl by when one gave out? It would be good-bye baby.”
“You don't understand. Look, you're filling the tire with about thirty pounds of air, not dynamite.”
“I'm not sold yet, Harvey.”
“Well, what is it you don't understand? Will you listen to what Edison has to say about them? You trust Al's opinion, I know.”””
“We'll see, Harv,” Ford said. “Oh, by the way, a Ford does not shake itself apart under any circumstances - with or without the miracle Firestone balloon tire.”
In Washington, President Harding's train car, the Superb, was delayed from leaving for one day by a convention of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. The press had reported the President's itinerary for what he was calling his crosscountry “Voyage of Understanding.” But the scheduled dates of speeches were not firm, and the Shriners were fitted in before his departure. For the occasion, Harding had dressed the capitol in the Shriners' colors. Red, green and yellow bunting drooped in the heat of his viewing platform. Platoons of Shriner brass bands passed before him, and Harding welcomed the 20,000 members and their families that day to the White House. He was pleased to shake every man's hand, but by the end of the day his own hands were swollen as if they'd been crushed.
He was soaking them in warm water, standing at the sink in his bedclothes.
“Wurr'n, that was a foolish thing to do,” the First Lady chastised him. “Your poor hands. Look at them, Wurr'n.”
Harding raised his hands from the bowl. “I love to meet people,” he said. “It's the most pleasant thing I do. It's really the only fun I have. It doesn't tax me, and it seems to give them great pleasure.”
“They don't care about you,” Mrs. Harding said. “They wouldn't even let you join them until you were President. Your influence is all they care about.”
“They don't care?” Harding said. “I'll have you know, my dear Duchess, that they inducted me into the Tall Cedars of Lebanon today. It's a new order, and a very prestigious one.”
“Some honor. You get to wear a hat that's sillier than most of the others. Shaped like a pyramid. It's an insult.”
He reached for a towel and made his hands into fists within it. “God damn it, Florence,” he said. “Would you please just shut up?”
Harding walked into the hall, where he was greeted eagerly by his Airedale, Laddie Boy. They went wearily to his bedroom, and Mrs. Harding retired to hers.
5
THE FIRST GROUP OF CAMPERS - THE ONE LED BY Edison - had reached Elkins, West Virginia. Elkins was a small town, and a string of automobiles the length of the campers' never passed through it unless someone important there was being buried. Because of this, townspeople removed their hats as the cars drove past them, and they wondered who it might be who had died.
Outside the town, Edison directed the lead car to pull off the road, instructing someone to go back into Elkins to rendezvous with Ford's and Firestone's gang. “Word of our arrival,” he said, “will not be far behind. We could have a thousand people on our hands if Henry and H.S. are lagging along the roadside somewhere. Go wait for them at the post office.”
Halverton felt conspicuous at best. He had been thinking that he was the only person in the entire expedition who wasn't some sort of scientist, entrepreneur, or Edison confidante. He had waved when anyone in a car ahead of him had turned in his direction, and now that they had halted, he felt completely out of his element. Some of the passengers were getting out of their cars now, and he and Margarete did the same.
“I never know what to do around new people,” he said to her. “I don't know what to say.”
She took him by the arm. “We'll simply walk up there,” she said. “We'll introduce ourselves, keeping in mind that we are all equals.”
“And forget that some of us are millionaires,” Halverton added.
Halverton had a tendency to take his own skills and virtues for granted. He didn't find the ability to decipher and execute a set of plans at his job the least bit unusual. But he was in awe of Edison, someone who could dream up projects with no apparent effort. And he assumed that Edison's friends and employees were just as distinctive and creative. So he held back, rather than place what he felt was his obvious ignorance on display.
They joined a group in some shade at the side of the road. Halverton had been wearing a straw hat, and he held it now by the brim with both hands as he talked with the others. Most of them were older than he, but many were near his own age. He didn't recognize any of their names.
“And how are you connected with Mr. Edison, Mr. Halverton?” someone asked him.
“Just barely,” was the answer. “I have the idea that I was invited on a whim.” He related the incident at the canvas factory.
“No, if he took a shining to you - and he certainly doesn't to everyone - it was no whim,” Halverton was assured. “Have you spoken with him yet today?”
“No, I haven't had the chance.”
“He'll remember you. He's not one to forget someone.”
Halverton could see Edison in the background. Mrs. Edison had brought him a pillow a minute earlier, and he was now sound asleep in the gravel, as comfortable as if he were at home in his own bed.
Sandwiches were passed around, and Halverton sat on a blanket with Margarete. “Does it bother you that I'm so much younger than you?” he asked her.
“And how old do you think I am?”
“I don't know. Forty maybe.”
“That's exactly it,” she said. “In Europe, it's very common for a woman to have a younger husband, a younger lover.” She watched his reaction, or lack of one. “Does it matter to you?”
He shook his head and squeezed her hand. Horns began to sound from the direction of the town, strained, joyous toots that were an integral part of the wooden-spoked, simple machines. The campers began to stand, some of them holding their plates, smiling to themselves as the first truck rounded a curve into view. It was a boxlike thing with the words Buy Firestone Tires emblazoned across its hump. Someone stirred Edison from his sleep, and the old man jumped to his feet, the first to meet the reinforcements.
“Another quarter hour, and we'd have left you behind,” he shouted.
Henry Ford opened the door and stepped onto the ground. “We found a family whose car had broken down on the road,” he said. “It was a Chrysler. Couldn't leave them in that condition. Fixed their car and sent them on their way. If not for that, we'd have beat you here.”
“And what's your excuse, Mister Firestone?” Edison asked. “Are you sticking to that lame story?”
“We stopped once or twice,” Firestone said. “I knew you'd lay down the rules once we got together, so I took the chance to shave when I had it.”
“You're a tenderfoot, Harvey,” Edison said. “Before you know it, you'll be dressed as a dude. No baths except in rivers, and no shaves. Period. We've left that back in civilization.”
Firestone slowly broke into a grin, his face suddenly showing the cause of its wrinkles. The youngest of the trio at fifty-three, he didn't mind being the butt of their ribbing. He stepped forward and hugged Edison warmly.
“Harvey's got an announcement to make,” Ford said. “Let's get everyone together for it, and we can get on our way.
Firestone gestured and shouted the group closer to him. There were nearly sixty people around him now.
“Gentlemen and ladies,” he spoke from the running board. “This little excursion has become an annual event. It's our seventh year in a row now, our third since we lost our partner, our good and gentle friend John Burroughs. We're just a bunch of Ohio boys ourselves. For those of you joining us for the first time, take it from me that we'll do our share of the chores. Mr. Edison here claims to have a campsite staked out. Experience has shown that to mean that we'll follow his nose.”
Firestone calmed the laughter with a hushing motion of his hands before continuing.
“There's another Ohio boy starting a trip to Alaska in the morning. I invited him to meet up with us weeks ago, and I talked with him by telephone last night. He said if we can leave a trail he can follow, he'll be happy to be our guest for a few days. President Harding has a speech northeast of here in Martinsburg tomorrow and will motor into our camp sometime in the late afternoon or evening.”
Halverton squeezed Margarete's arm at the announcement. “Then it's true,” he said. “It was rumored he was coming, but I could hardly believe it. I still can't.”
Margarete strained to hear whatever else Firestone was saying, but he had finished. “Now aren't you glad you're here?” she asked.
Edison did not appear impressed by the news. He either hadn't heard it clearly, or it just was not a matter of great importance to him. He turned his back on Firestone when he had finished speaking and began to walk through the congregation toward his automobile. Seeing Halverton for the first time that day, he stopped abruptly and sought him out.
“Mr. Halverton,” he said. “I'm so happy you could come. Didn't have any trouble getting off work, did you?”
“Not when I told them why,” Halverton answered.
“You've surely put a roof over our heads with those tents of yours. Seems I neglected to design a presidential model, though.”
Halverton was embarrassed, overwhelmed actually, at being face to face with Edison. “I don't know what to say,” he said.
“Then introduce me to the pretty lady you're with,” Edison said, cupping his hand behind his ear.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “This is Margarete Fabry.”
Margarete was six feet tall and towered impressively over Edison, who reached out and shook her hand. “A lovely lady,” he said. Then he turned and walked to his car where he gathered his hat from his wife. He made his way back to Firestone's truck in order for the expedition's leaders to ride three abreast.
“You were right about him, Sid,” Margarete said. “He could charm the salt out of the sea. A nice old man.”
Engines began to start. Halverton had one of the few cars without an electric starter, and while he was cranking the thing up, vehicles began to pass him on their way into the woods. Edison was again in the lead, and true to Firestone's prediction, he began to take the campers as far from the beaten trail as the cars and trucks would carry them. They bounced in and out of ruts, on occasion jarring a passenger out of his seat, vaulting him a foot into the air amid shrieks of delight. They discovered Sully, a town of a few dozen mountain people. There the power lines came to an end, but deeper into the Monongahela Forest they drove. If a crossroads looked more promising, that is, more difficult to traverse, Edison would halt the progress of the fleet and direct the lead car that way. Once, the entire string of vehicles had to back up nearly half a mile after Edison's choice of a dead-end logging trail. They wound through the mountains for an hour. Birds crisscrossed above them, and views of valleys and mountaintops when they could be seen through the trees were breathtaking. They passed the last sign of civilization, a cabin on a ridge, the smoke of its chimney its only hint of habitation. Ahead was a small clearing. It lay spread out on the banks of a creek. The cars and trucks drove over a wooden bridge and at last shut off their motors.
The workers in the party swarmed like drones around a hive to put the camp in order. Several projects were simultaneously shaping up, Ford supervising the management of a pile of wood, taking his own turn with the ax when someone needed a breather. Firestone was discussing with the cooks the evening meal and the most efficient arrangement of the galley with the dining area. Edison offered only a suggestion or two to some young men climbing trees, stringing from one to the next a wire that unreeled from the rear of one of the trucks. He walked beneath them and pointed with a stick to strategic places that would best support the cable. It was Edison's intention that the camp would not only be supplied with lights, including electricity in the individual tents, but the galley would have the latest electric conveniences, from fist-sized marshmallow toasters to a walk-in refrigerator. For their entertainment, an electric player piano could provide background accompaniment to the dozen films that were stowed away with the movie projector.
The source of the electricity was a single storage battery perfected by Edison and his “insomnia squad,” as he called them. Once developed, the Edison storage battery vaulted into immediate use by the fleet of American Express trucks, on trolleys where there were no power lines, to operate floating buoys' flashing lights in harbors, for lighting systems on yachts, for the New York subway system's signals, in rural homes far from power stations, as well as on farms and for lighting submarines as they sailed underwater. The battery was but one of nearly eleven hundred Edison patents.
“That does it, sir,” Halverton could hear from one of the trees. “Would you like to throw the switch and see if she works?”
Edison smiled and shook his head. The system had been tested countless times before.
The focal point of the campsite, the center of activity shared by all the campers, was the dining tent. Its support pole was a birch tree stripped of its limbs. The canvas was attached to a metal ring hoisted over and secured to the treetop and draped out like a skirt, where ropes and stakes conformed its perimeter into four-foot walls. Its height at the center was twelve feet above a circular table that had been fitted around the smooth white bark of the tree's trunk. There was room in the tent for a sit-down dinner for eighteen. The tent could take advantage of breezes by opening on two sides. It was designed by Edison and assembled at the Trenton Canvas Company.
The trip had been tiring. Cooks began setting out hams, with a tub of potato salad and a cauldron of beans. The weary campers served themselves, eating in shifts in the dining tent or finding room on stools and canvas chairs. Halverton and Margarete leaned their backs against a tree trunk, holding their plates over their laps. Edison passed up the conventional meal and filled himself instead with a large slice of apple pie and a handful of cookies washed down with two cups of coffee heaped with sugar. Taking note of the dinner, Halverton recalled an admonishment he used to receive at meals as a child. “An unbalanced meal makes for an unbalanced boy.” But he wouldn't dream of suggesting such a thing to Edison, living disproof of the childhood warning.
Halverton began stowing his things away in his quarters. He shared a tent with three other bachelors, and Margarete's tent housed two of their fiances. He and Margarete drew some stares because of the differences in their ages, but mainly because no one in camp really knew who they were. Everyone took them for a respectable couple, and they slept in separate tents. Halverton was a good sport about accepting the restriction. He and Margarete could always steal away for an hour or two alone, and he had every intention of doing just that. But the campground was divided into men's and women's quarters. Even married couples were split apart. Halverton wondered whose idea it was. The only pairs who enjoyed the privacy of their own tents were the Edisons, the Fords and the Firestones.
Ford and Firestone meandered through the camp after eating in order to meet people they didn't know. They were genuinely friendly, more like neighbors than anything else. “What's your name? Where are you from?”
“Sidney Halverton, sir. I'm from Texas originally, but I've lived in Trenton about four years. This is Margarete Fabry.”
Ford shook his hand, and Halverton saw something in the man's expression, or within the face itself, a wildness or intensity about the eyes that put him on edge. He released his grasp, and Ford bounded ahead two steps and leaped, latching on to a tree limb where he began to rapidly chin himself.
“I'll take on any man in camp,” he said without straining. “Forty-yard dash, hundred-yard dash, a mile overland. I don't care.” He dropped to the ground. “Any takers?” He looked at Halverton. “You seem in pretty good shape.”
“No thanks,” Halverton said. He felt conspicuous, not knowing whether he could joke along with Henry Ford or to take the challenge seriously.
“Lucky for you,” Ford said before going his way.
Just as Halverton made himself comfortable on the ground again, he had to stand to shake Firestone's hand. “Sit back down,” Firestone said, joining them in the grass. “You're here at Al's invitation, is that right?”
“Yes sir,” Halverton said. “My company, or should I say, the company I work for, made some of the newer tents for the trip.”
“Oh, then you're the one who knows Morse Code. Al certainly got a kick out of that. I really like that dining tent,” Firestone told him. “We'll get out money's worth out of it, I'm sure.”
“This is such a beautiful place,” Margarete said. “How did you ever discover it?”
“That was Mister Edison's doing too,” Firestone said. “And 'discovered' is the right word in this case. He has some government maps, and they point us in the general direction. He writes us, giving us the route. Then he writes us again, changing to another route. And when we actually start, he usually selects a third. We don't ever know where we're going. I don't think he does either. You saw how we got here.”
Margarete took a drink of water she had poured. Firestone had scarcely taken his eyes off of her while he was talking. She had had that effect on men since about the age of fifteen, and it was something she took for granted now. Something about the delicacy of her features contrasting with her black hair made one think of Asia. She could be Indian, Spanish, Oriental, Mexican, anything exotic.
“When do you expect the President?” she asked.
“Late tomorrow sometime,” Firestone answered. “We don't know for sure. I'm sending a man back into that last town we passed through. He's to join the presidential party and guide it here. They're a pretty good-sized group themselves. Did you two get enough to eat? There's plenty left if you're still hungry. Don't be bashful.”
“None for me, thanks,” Halverton said.
Margarete shook her head.
“Well, enjoy yourselves,” Firestone said. “Come to me if you have any complaints.” He shook their hands as they stood. Then he walked to the next cluster of people.
“It's funny meeting someone famous,” Halverton said over their food.
“How do you mean?” Margarete asked.
“Well, their faces are already so familiar from years of exposure in magazines and papers and newsreels. It's like you already know them. How strange it must be for them to see that look of recognition in every stranger's eyes.”
“It must make them quite cautious, I would think.”
“Maybe so, but they're so outgoing that they put you at ease. They seem genuinely friendly.”
When the sun was about to set, the lights around the perimeter of the camp began to glow, and the tents with their lights within looked like a cluster of Japanese lanterns. A fire burned in the center of the site, and when it had been reduced to a pillow of coals, the lights were extinguished one by one.
From his cot, Halverton could see out the flap of his tent across the way to the dining tent. Seated alone at the table was the only person to have brought along any books. Edison was reading Robert Burns. He placed the book on the table and sat for a long time, his gaze upward, either in contemplation of the poetry he had just read or in fascination with the light bulb. Halverton watched for a few minutes, his eyes blinking slowly and heavily. With the image of Edison seated at the table, he began to sleep soundly.
“M.H.” MEETS PRESIDENT HARDING is available in its entirety as an ebook.
THE SANITY MATINEE
WAY BACK IN 1975, Sprayberry wouldn't have gone so far to say that he loved Parkland Life and Casualty. Admitting it would make him sound like a company man. That's what he was, of course, but there was a connotation there he didn't care for. He liked his job. Good salary. A great benefits package. Plenty of challenges. And yet no challenge so great that he couldn't meet it. He had enjoyed so much success during his tenure there that he had to rein himself in now and then to maintain the proper perspective. He had breezed through more than one department-Personnel, Claims, Appraisals. He was currently steering the newly spawned hybrid of Public Relations and Advertising. He had earned a reputation as a departmental troubleshooter, streamlining operations with what appeared to be instinct, a knack for seeing just what was needed and taking care of it. His method was simplicity itself. In each new office, Sprayberry's first task was to squeeze the budget for a modest raise for everyone who worked under him. Then, by dropping a suggestion here and there, he had a fired-up and loyal team behind him to carry his directives through. For all his efficiency, Sprayberry still encountered pockets of resentment within the company. Once, while playing horseshoes at the annual company picnic, Albert Tenance, a man on the way out, loudly and bitterly criticized Sprayberry's athletic form. The harsh judgment was completely out of proportion to the situation. Tenance had become red-faced and belligerent. He maintained that Sprayberry “couldn't hit the ocean with a horseshoe if he was standing on a pier at high tide.” Sprayberry considered the source and shrugged the incident off, a little hurt that his own department hadn't rallied to his defense, their stupefied silence seen somehow as an alliance with the Tenance faction.
And another time, seated in a bathroom stall, Sprayberry overheard an executive bring up his name. “Sprayberry?” the executive's companion had blurted. “You mean Golden Boy? Lord Perfecto?” Sprayberry waited out the other two, washing his hands and envisioning himself in charge of a global operation. He would give the two guys enormous promotions, and then transfer them with such frequency that their children wouldn't finish a grade of school on so much as the same continent. Maybe he would force them to chase winter the year round, playing hopscotch with the hemispheres until frostbite set in. Sprayberry was a nice guy, though. He was not vindictive, and he rarely carried a grudge, even as a child. He didn't see the point in it. He did find a healthy release in his daydreamed power plays. And he admitted to himself that he had an ambitious streak within him. That was the real reason for the resentment in the men's room. Sprayberry was going places, and he wasn't yet thirty. He gave the impression of someone who would knock you out of the way if you weren't scrambling just as hard. The higher-ups were well aware of this. They knew that Sprayberry's catalytic presence edged everyone closer to their peak output. They were glad to have him, he was glad to be there, and everything at Parkland Life and Casualty was humming along like a perpetual motion machine, thriving on the energy that it produced. Sprayberry was no small part in that bundle of energy. He was good at his job, and he really did love it a little.
Sprayberry distinguished himself in that he did exceptional work, and he almost always left it at the office. There were times when his wife didn't have an inkling as to the true nature of his work. On one of the rare occasions when she had asked how things were going at Parkland, he had mentioned that he was taking a videocassette of some commercials to a local television station. “I managed a good deal on the rates, too,” he had told her. This was her introduction to the fact that her husband had been spearheading Public Relations /Advertising for a month.
Sprayberry admitted to himself the very real possibility of any life event. He did rule out a few items. Such occurrences as divorce, murder, arrest on criminal charges, and nervous breakdowns were about as remote to him as lightning striking his mother-in-law, another one of his daydreams. He liked to think that infidelity was out of the question as well, even though he knew, statistically, another woman would come his way by and by. Sprayberry was crazy about his wife, and he couldn't imagine doing anything willfully to hurt her.
About Sprayberry's wife. She was younger than he was by five years, the former Terri Jean McMasters. At the time of their meeting, she was further advanced in her field than he was in his. Her chosen area of expertise happened to be cheerleading, and she was one of the best. She had risen to the rank of head cheerleader at Louisiana State University through nearly a lifetime of lower-echelon cheering and socializing. At the age of twelve, she had distinguished herself by being the first girl anywhere to organize a sorority in junior high school. The following year, she was egging on gangly boys with her wild enthusiasm, boys contending with two-a-day drills as well as the rigors of puberty. She sternly shaped the other youngsters into a viable pep squad. Terri Jean even showed up at the football practices as the heat rose in layers off the playing field, the sweat of summer in the South smothering them one and all. In high school, Terri McMasters and her screaming leadership heralded two state basketball championship teams and three semifinalists in football. She was known on sight in all of Saint Tammany Parish, and by reputation across the state. Six major universities and a junior college recruited her for her talents. She chose LSU, with the stipulation that she would have a clear shot at head cheerleader by her junior year, “without playing bullshit politics.” The campus sororities fought for her membership like sharks.
Her family was comfortable financially, the source of their wealth being a share in a half-dozen department stores. The stores were not large, but they were sprinkled across southern Louisiana in key small towns, where competition was virtually nonexistent. Off and on during her formative years, Terri had labored in the family business. She wasn't fond of the tedium of retail work, but she did learn a great deal about fabric. She chose all of Sprayberry's clothes, and they looked great on him. Once, Sprayberry had brought home a set of sheets as a surprise. She quickly pointed out to her husband that their inferior quality was the reason they had been on sale. “Do you even know what a thread count is?” she had assailed him. “Don't even look at linen that's under two hundred. That's two hundred threads to the square inch. These rags are only one-ten.” The family stores, Terri's great fabric-learning ground, were appropriately called McMasters.
Sprayberry was working out of Personnel when their paths crossed. He had been dispatched to LSU to look over the crop of graduating seniors in the school of business administration. For the better part of a week, he worked on a recruitment program of his own design. He met with individual students, with professors and small groups. There were three or four good prospects, and he did manage to snare one for the company. Pleased with himself, but somewhat exhausted, he had decided to unwind by taking in a basketball game.
It was there in the gymnasium that he saw her. The crowd and the game receded into silence and darkness. Sprayberry's attention was focused on her smooth, springy legs, her hair streaming through the air as her body went through a ritual of cartwheels, leaps, squats, flips, and somersaults. She was a cheetah with wings. She was sex, beauty, youth, but especially sex. Her face had a sleepy quality about it which captivated Sprayberry at once, and a cowlick at her hairline that seemed to arch one eyebrow. There was a good-natured confidence he saw in her routines, as if she was aware at one and the same time of the absurdity and virtuosity of what she was doing. Sprayberry began to anticipate the time-outs when the cheerleaders took to the floor. During the half, he changed seats and managed to get two rows from the court. From his new vantage point, he could distinguish her husky voice amid the cacophony of shouts that filled the gymnasium. He could read her name on her sweater, and heard himself saying it a time or two aloud as the scoreboard hourglassed the final seconds of the game. The final buzzer sounded, and his reluctance to approach her on the playing floor among the dispersing crowd was overshadowed by the realization that it might be his only chance. Ever. This was not like him. He walked onto the court. People were filing past in all directions. He was near enough to her now to see a band of sweat across her upper lip. That cinched it somehow. He touched her damp arm and smiled.
“I'm Al Sprayberry, and I'd like to walk you home.”
“You would, would you?”
“Right.”
“What are you, a graduate student? You don't look like a professor.”
“I'm in Baton Rouge on business.”
She wiped her arms and face with a towel, and the gesture drove Sprayberry crazy.
“Does your business have anything to do with picking up girls and having your way with them?”
Sprayberry knew that his answer was critical. She sounded smart, which was a nice bonus to accompany those moves he'd seen her make.
“I go after the best prospects in the business schools and try to lure them toward my insurance company,” he said. “I dangle salaries before them, and bonuses, and vacations.”
“And what have you got to offer me?” she asked.
“Just my heart,” Sprayberry told her.
In fact, the cheerleader had grown weary of her male college peers. They seemed so closely tied to adolescence that she welcomed Sprayberry's attention. She was amused and flattered. Her sense of romance and adventure was triggered. If Sprayberry's remarks were premeditated and rehearsed, she would find out soon enough. She felt he was worth the risk. She would investigate.
She bent down to retrieve a sort of flight bag, folding her arms and looking into his face. She correctly assumed that she had completely unnerved him. Hardly a soul was left in the gymnasium by then. “I know this is how girls end up in the trunks of abandoned cars,” she said. “But you have a good face. Give me five minutes to clean up, and I'll meet you outside.”
If Sprayberry was astonished at his own boldness and Terri's almost immediate acceptance, he was utterly thunderstruck by her appearance on the steps leading to the gym. He had feared that she would slip out the back way, second thoughts overcoming her as she showered. She moved toward him down the concrete steps, and even in the dim light, she looked tremendous to Sprayberry-designer jeans, heels, an unbuttoned silk shirt tied at the waist. They walked together in silence for a block, and it was Terri who finally spoke.
“My things are at the Tri Delt house out on Dalrymple Drive. You know where that is?”
“I don't even know what that is.”
“I'll be moving out in a little while. It's my last semester.”
Sprayberry suddenly remembered that strange unit of time, time measured on campuses not in weeks or months, but semesters, about a season and a half in duration.
“What will you do when you graduate?”
“I'm not sure. I've been contacted by the Washington Redskins.”
“What position would you play?”
“The cheerleaders, Al Sprayberry,” she said. “Hey, don't you even want to know my name?”
“You're Terri. I saw your sweater.”
“Terri Jean McMasters. Terri McMasters. Terri Jean.”
“Nice names.”
She stepped off the curb in the dim brilliance of a streetlight, hesitating there a moment, highlighted that way against the concrete between the parked cars. She squeezed a hand into her pocket and extracted a ring of keys. “This is my car,” she told him. “We can drive the rest of the way, either to the Tri Delt house, or beyond. Where are you staying?”
This was another critical point for Sprayberry. She was unlocking his door from within the car. For just a moment, he considered lurching into the back seat for a laugh. But when the door opened, he climbed in. Before she could start the engine, he pulled her to him. She didn't resist. They kissed. He pulled on her lower lip with his teeth and tasted her mouth. It was crazy to him, like a dream. He felt her move her hand down his chest toward his pants, where her fingertips skated across his crotch. She broke his embrace. “I'm sort of living with this guy,” she said, and Sprayberry's heart went into a swan dive. “But we have an understanding.”
This was the beginning of Sprayberry's courtship of his future wife. As expected, the guy she was living with proved to be a problem, but he was out of the picture soon enough. Sprayberry's meeting Terri, and ending up being married to her, was a life event he would have almost automatically considered to be entirely out of reach. But that was the nice thing about life events, and the danger of them. Classifying something as impossible didn't necessarily make it so.
The wedding was large and formal, so much so that it reminded Sprayberry of a coronation. It seemed to him that his new wife reigned over a cheerleading empire of devoted subjects, and it was clear that he was inheriting royalty by marriage. Almost everyone within the cathedral were there to see Terri. There were her relatives, the group of uncles who ran the little chain of stores. Sorority sisters had turned out en masse. Sprayberry recognized more than one cheerleader from that first basketball game. They were all crazy about Terri. Sprayberry, away from his home town, had invited only his immediate family and one or two others. Which was fine. There wouldn't have been room at the reception for more than a handful of his guests anyway. He felt a little intimidated by the vast number of strangers, a tuxedoed spectator when he should have shared at least a slice of the attention. He did have one or two misgivings about the whole embarkation of marriage. The guy she had lived with showed up, and had become emotional during his toast to the wedding couple. Sprayberry wanted to rush to him to throw an arm around him in sympathetic support. Yet, at the same time, it felt wonderful to see the lived-with guy fall apart that way. Another man seemed to prolong a kiss to the bride as well, and Sprayberry thought he glimpsed a little tongue play from both parties during the embrace. Wisely, he didn't bring it up with Terri. He did feel guilty about what he had done to her name. Terri Sprayberry. It seemed to him to have lost its dignity, sounding now like a pogo stick splashing through a mud puddle. In fact, the name change had been Terri's last stumbling block, her only real reluctance to the marriage. Sprayberry suggested she keep McMasters. He liked the boisterousness of its sound, as if McMasters was a gunfighter or a circus aerialist. It seemed to fit her nature. But she insisted that if she accept Sprayberry for better or for worse, she was going to take the entire package, name and all. Touched by the gesture, Sprayberry still felt an anxiety for reducing that cheetah with wings into a simple homonym.
Sprayberry's life did not change at the onslaught of marriage. He lived in the same city, enjoyed the same foods, and continued his progress at Parkland Life and Casualty. It was Terri who had been uprooted. She loved her husband well enough, and she channeled her efforts into the marriage. In a couple of years, they purchased a home. It was not a new one, but it was hardly run-down. Terri took charge of its appearance from the foundation up. She hired landscapists for the yard, chose paint colors inside and out, and coordinated carpets, hardware, tile and light fixtures. Sprayberry considered some of the choices a bit garish-striped lime green and tangerine wallpaper in the bathroom, for example. But he could live with it. He believed in positive reinforcement for her projects. He went on and on about the fireplace mantle to her. When guests were given a tour of the house, Sprayberry was always sure to draw them aside, throw an arm on the ledge, strike a pose, and say proudly, “Isn't this some mantle?”
“It's just a board mounted on the wall!” Terri would protest.
He was proud of what she had done to the house. True, its condition had been absolutely liveable when they had drawn up the papers for it, but now it reflected her tastes. He could overlook the gaudy flareups here and there.
It overwhelmed him at times that he was so attracted to his wife. He wondered what he had done to deserve her. She looked like a fashion model, and he sometimes wondered why she wasn't confidently strolling down a style-show runway than being shackled to him. In public, men broke their necks turning to look at her as she passed. From time to time, Sprayberry mentioned how fortunate he was to be with her. Massaging one of her breasts one night, he paused and told her, “I can still hardly believe what a lucky guy I am.”
“How do you mean?”
“Everything's perfect,” he said, and moved to the other breast.
It was an exaggeration, of course.
Sprayberry's mother-in-law got on his nerves. While he felt blessed that she did not live in the same city, was in fact a resident of a neighboring state, her occasional and unannounced visits were perpetual tests of his patience. He realized that mothers-in-law were standards of American humor and standup comedy, and, taking this into account, he made an effort to see the lighter side of her visits. It was her air of superiority that drew Sprayberry's objection. Maxine McMasters treated her son-in-law as a servant from the moment she appeared in his driveway, emerging from her Cadillac in a cloud of cigarette smoke and perfume. At times, she would not address him directly, preferring instead to speak about him to her toy poodle, an ancient, balding sponge of an animal that she carried in the manner of a ventriloquist and her dummy. Sprayberry didn't mind the dog, which was only conforming to its inbred hyper nature. And he didn't see a point in waging an out and out vendetta against Maxine. That would give her some justification for her rudeness. So he busied himself with other things while she was there. He watched TV, went for walks, and looked through magazines. Terri would come to his defense from time to time. Once, speaking in baby talk to the poodle, Maxine had complained that Sprayberry “could never-ever wove her Tewwi wike her mommy do.”
“Mom, cut the shit,” Terri had said.
Another thorn in Sprayberry side was yard work. He appreciated that proper maintenance of a home-cutting dead limbs, picking up litter-made good sense. But he couldn't fathom how some of his neighbors would spend the better part of a day nurturing and babying what he saw as an unleashed plague, the ever-growing strain of San Augustine grass. “For God's sake, Terri, we get forty-eight inches of rain here, and those guys are out there watering their lawns!” Admittedly, the yard looked great after a good trim, but in a week it was out of control again. Sprayberry's city was hot and humid, and he could let the yard go ten days tops in the growing season. Then, full of resentment, he would fire up the mower and cut down everything in his way. He had lowered the blade on the mower to practically uproot the grass. He never watered, but it was a constant battle. The chore only took an hour of his time, but he truly hated it. He could have hired a neighborhood kid to take care of it, but he felt duty-bound. Besides, he had seen Parkland pay off on more than one claim over total strangers taking advantage of a homeowner's policy. And after all the work that Terri had put into the house, it seemed only fair that he should take care of the lawn. There were a few rose bushes left from the previous owner, but Sprayberry apparently didn't have the touch with plants. The roses formed beautiful buds, but instead of blooming, the petals invariably exploded and fell to the ground like trash. Still, compared to his mother-in-law, yard work was nothing. He would take care of every lawn on the block, front and back, for a mother-in-law who didn't consider him a busboy.
There was a slight problem with his sex life as well. Early in the marriage, Terri voiced a fear of becoming pregnant. She said that it was an overriding concern of hers since learning the facts of life. She discounted wild theories of public toilets and swimming pools, but felt that she had to be on guard constantly against a chance impregnation. Sprayberry felt that her concern was possibly a phobia, and he tried to reassure her on that front. As a result, their method of birth control was a grab bag of every technique and device on the market. Terri was simultaneously on the Pill, employed an IUD, and inserted a diaphragm. A spermicide and douche followed their lovemaking. During the act, she insisted that Sprayberry wear two condoms. As a joke once, he blurted out, with panic in his voice, “Something happened. The rubber. Oh no! It slipped off!” The ruse unleashed hidden springboard cheer-leading muscles, perhaps the ones used in backflips. Terri heaved him physically from the bed, a feat he would have believed impossible. She became hysterical, and once calmed down, didn't forgive him for days. Sprayberry never repeated such a stunt. He did feel, however, that the abundance of contraceptive hardware had a tendency to hamper spontaneity in that department of his life. There were times when he felt more like a skin diver exploring a sunken ship than a man in bed with his wife.
With the completion of the home decorating, he was concerned that Terri would become listless and bored. He still had his work and plenty of diversions around the house. He hoped that she would be able to throw herself into something with the fervor she had shown toward the house. She did. One of her passions became the approaching American Bicentennial. She became captivated head over heels with the idea of the republic's two-hundredth birthday. Terri wasn't the only one obsessed with red, white, and blue bric-a-brac. Sprayberry saw it all around him. On his way home from work one day, he stopped his car down the street to witness a group of children painting a fire hydrant. He noticed more and more of the plugs cropping up in a variety of patriotic motifs all over town. Some were painted like stubby little Minutemen. A particularly ingenious one had been transformed into a dwarflike, uniformed George Washington. But all in all, they were ugly sentries, crude totems of red, white, and blue. The idea of painting a fire hydrant to celebrate the nation's birthday intrigued him. Why fire plugs? Why not chimneys and hubcaps? He failed to see a connection, but painting the hydrants had become a fad. And if they were so abundant in his home town, he could only imagine their staggering numbers on a national scale. Sprayberry never voiced it to anyone, but he considered the activity to present a very real danger. He was certain that, during an emergency, the unofficial colors might sufficiently delay a harried firefighter's valuable hook-up time. Watching the kids with the buckets of paints, he pictured his home needlessly gutted by flames. There was a hydrant right on his property line, and he knew that it was inevitable that the neighborhood's patriotic delinquents would decide that it required redecorating. The thought depressed Sprayberry as he saw only his barren and charred chimney rising above a pile of rubble. He drove on down to his driveway, hoping that his wife would restrict her own Bicentennial activities to safe, responsible ones.
He noticed Terri emptying the side pocket of her purse once into a kitchen drawer, and he asked her what she was doing. “Commemorative coins,” she said without elaborating. But he knew what she had meant. In tribute to the two-hundredth anniversary of the country, the United States mint had come out with new quarters and half-dollars. Normally, the reverse side of both coins depicted two variations of the nation's symbol, the bald eagle. But for the occasion of the big birthday, the bird had been replaced with new scenes. On the fifty-cent piece, there was now a picture of a building-Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The quarter now was graced by a man wearing a triangular hat and beating on a drum. The front of the coins, below the faces of two dead former presidents of the country, were dated “1776-1976.” Terri had Sprayberry keep an eye out for the new coinage, and whenever he ran across one, he was certain to turn it over dutifully to her. When he paid the paperboy with new quarters one evening, she threatened to kill him, speaking figuratively, of course. The actual value of the new coins was very little, and the new artwork had a noticeable lack of detail. But they were extremely popular. Terri wasn't the only one hoarding them. They were just like the red, white, and blue fire hydrants-a symbol of a brief time. Sprayberry had given up on expecting to run across any really valuable coin in his change. As a boy, he had collected pennies, constantly on the lookout for that Holy Grail of American coins, the 1804 silver dollar. That rarity was advertised in the comic books he would read, offering a fortune to anyone who might turn one in. As if Sprayberry would really get one in his change. Encountering the new quarter didn't stir much emotion in the populace because hardly anyone gave a thought to George Washington. The father of the country was a figure from the dim historical past, as ancient a legend as Moses, a wooden-toothed guy who skipped coins across the Potomac. But when Sprayberry saw the half dollar, or any reminder of President Kennedy for that matter, he recalled the circumstances upon hearing the news of the young leader's murder. Sprayberry was enrolled in a Catholic school in Houston, the city where Kennedy had had his last night's rest. When the principal announced the tragedy over the intercom, Sprayberry's teacher, a nun from the North who had watched the Presidential motorcade the previous evening, began pacing the classroom. A sneer developed on her hooded face. “You, you Texans!” she said. “You ought to be real proud of yourselves today. Very, very proud.” Now, in addition to feeling awful about Kennedy, the children in the room were made to feel terrible about even living in the same state where the assassination took place-guilt by association. The nun never did apologize to the kids for her behavior, and Sprayberry thought a great deal less of her because of it. During his upbringing, Sprayberry was witness to a number of outbursts and harangues from his father concerning their northern neighbors. Yankees, among other things, put ketchup on their hot dogs and beans in their chili. But what exactly was Sprayberry? A Texan? He was growing up in the suburb of a large city. It was just a bunch of houses, and no one had come door to door consulting him on the advisability and placement of sharpshooters. Maybe, beyond his neighborhood, or outside of Houston, it was different. But there in his house, even if chili was served separately from beans, Sprayberry did not feel Texan. Was there really such a place?
The irony of Sprayberry's father's mistrust of northerners was Sprayberry's own extremely poor sense of direction. He knew only one route from his house to the Parkland Building on the West Loop. If there was a detour on the freeway, forget it. He was late for work, zigzagging in a harried attempt to keep one eye on the street, the other on the freeway he had been forced to evacuate. It wasn't as if he had just moved to Houston. He was a native of it. He had always been that way. As a child playing hide and seek, he was rarely found, ending up on the fringes of his subdivision, blocks and blocks from a familiar street, repeating his name and address to strangers in order to find his way home again. He would prefer to rely on public transportation to go to his office, but the city's bus system was in worse shape than Sprayberry's inner compass. He would read of bus breakdowns and people waiting for hours at a stop before being moved to their destinations. That wasn't for him. In a pinch, there was a taxi, but that was a ridiculous way to live when he could get where he wanted with just a little concentration. If he met a client for lunch, for example, he would get specific directions, and he was all right. Preferably someone else would drive from there. He was not a bad driver. On the contrary, his driving was exemplary. He just didn't know where he was going.
Houston had become a city of displaced Yankees, but they didn't get under his skin as they had his father's. He enjoyed hearing a variety of dialects. And an accent was the only real difference he had discovered in people anywhere. Parkland Life and Casualty was a national corporation and as such kept a great number of its people on the move. Sprayberry brushed against Yankees all the time. And he did have a little prejudice in that area, only to the extent that he could recognize someone from the north. He had received his training as a boy, in watching the old “Candid Camera” series on TV. Most of the show was filmed in New York City, the people in it the victims of various practical jokes. Bundled up against a frigid winter, Yankees were seen as pale, wavy-haired aliens who spoke in clipped and nasal tones, their words freezing before them in thick clouds. They were bewildered, and a little bit angry. Sprayberry, a burr-headed youngster in on the joke, only shook his head as a Yankee auto mechanic raised a hood on a car and shouted to his cohort, “Hey! Manny! Dis car, it got no engine!” Those were the people his father had condemned. “They are not like us,” was the message, but even as a boy, Sprayberry suspected that they were exactly like his own family and schoolmates.
He was the last of his immediate family to live in the city where he had grown up. His brother and two sisters had been resettled by business promotions and marriages. When his father took early retirement, his parents, too, had taken off. Their spaces had been filled by the mobile society drawn to the opportunity of the Sun Belt. If a census were taken of Houston in the manner of biblical days, that is, every citizen returning to the town of his birth to be counted, Houston would become a ghost town.
The past is prolonged. Before shifting gears from exposition to narrative, an additional detail or two would be helpful in explaining actions and behavior in Sprayberry's pivotal year, the long-ago past of 1975. Is anything being overlooked? It is likely. Sprayberry's past crops up now and then, like memories that come to mind for no particular reason. Here's something. As a child in parochial school, Sprayberry had a difficult time understanding how he was responsible when they nailed Jesus to the Cross, how it was his fault when Adam and Eve had eaten the apple. Not even his mother and father could give him a proper explanation. But, as a Catholic boy, he nonetheless shouldered the responsibility of God's disappointment in human beings. Asked what he had learned in school on a day mostly spent kneeling in prayer, he knew the right answer to give. “Fractions.”
That's all fine, the reader might observe. But did Sprayberry look at other women? Will his marriage be a lasting one? Can he expect to iron out the differences with his mother-in-law? Does the title really refer to anything, or is it just a catchy phrase? Does he still go to Mass and confess his sins to a priest? Fractions.
All in all, Sprayberry's life had run on a fairly even keel. But way back in the year that his wife began hoarding coins, when children painted fire hydrants for the fun of it, a subtle, errant wind began to seize Sprayberry's sails, taking him casually on a course to the edge of the Earth.
THE SANITY MATINEE in its entirety is available as an ebook.